The Po Show

Philadelphia Freedom

Dang, I've had Elton John in my head for a week :p. All because I decided that we really needed to go somewhere for Memorial Day weekend, since we have gone NOWHERE on the east coast in the 4 years we've lived here, and we might be (hope to be!) leaving soon.

So it was narrowed down to Philly or D.C., but I couldn't quite handle the thought of a 4+ hour drive for a weekend trip, so Hotwire came to the rescue. We love Hotwire, which allows us to stay in ritzy hotels we could never otherwise afford. The Hyatt at Penn's Landing was just lovely and Tessa was all ready to move in. I'm serious. She wanted to move there, except she expected us to go home first and get all her stuff. Sigh, that girl has some high expectations for life.

So we saw the cradle of America, on Memorial Day weekend, which seemed sort of fitting. I did have to explain to the kids why people were putting up mock headstones for soldiers killed in Iraq, on the lawn in front of the Independence Center. And Tessa totally shocked me when she was looking at the Battleship New Jersey and said, "That's a battleship? For wars?" OMG, when did she learn what a war is??

We went light on the historical sites, since neither kid would have been too into it, but we did have to see the Liberty Bell. I figured that that would be one iconic sight that they would recognize and remember. And Matthew understood what Independence Hall was, since he knows what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are, vaguely. And he knows who Ben Franklin was, so it was cool for him to see all the references to that venerable gentleman.

We stuck to the kid-friendly venues, with the Franklin Institute being the biggest hit (as I suspected it would be). Again, I was struck how Matthew was so not into the biological science stuff that I love (he didn't even want to walk through the Giant Heart! Tessa and I went, and it was killer cool!), but he could have stayed all day in the Electricity and Newton's Loft sections. He is so intrigued by physics, and his grasp of concepts just blows me away.

Nothing terrible happened, which made it a successful trip :D. And both kids, at several points, told us how much fun they were having, so that made it a perfect trip. It's amazing how my own expectations of what makes for a good vacation have been revamped, how my own desires have become completely subsumed. And it's okay. Ross would ask me, "What would you like to do?" or "What would you like to eat?" and it just seemed BIZARRE to me that I could even entertain my own personal preferences. What I want is for my kids to be happy while they're on vacation.

And today is Memorial Day. We celebrated in the traditional way, with a barbeque with friends. Though that's not the way my family always celebrated this day. We always went to the cemetary to visit our dead folks. So in my mind I'm visiting my dad and my grandparents, and my cousins, and my aunts and uncles who died before I was born, all together at Forest Lawn Hollywood. I can see their markers, there on the hillside above Warner Brothers' Studios. My dad is buried under a crepe myrtle, that was a little tree 13 years ago, but is bigger now. The space for my mom's grave is next to his. My grandparents are further down the lawn, on a slope, past Bette Davis' grave.

Memorial Day is about memory, and respect, and holding those who have passed in our hearts. They are there.