At night, sometimes, in the summer, I go for a ride, late at night, while the city is sleeping.  Up past Kalorama, rolling on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, and then over the bridge, the far end the start of the long steady climb up Wisconsin Avenue and the Cathedral, there is a road less travelled, that dips down into the dell feeding streams into Rock Creek the other side of the creek, tamed by boulders and sewer outlets, beneath the original great hotels of the higher grounds, from the parkway.  The roads are narrow, well lit by street lamps, well paved, and hilly, such that one can plot out a course of hills to ride in succession.  At night there are bucks, two, with decent horn, in the front yards of home across from the Finnish Ambassador's Residence.

Lincoln, when he was here, as President, of course in the wartime, liked his nighttime horseback rides and walks.  One night, as is reported, he walked all the way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on up Massachusetts all the way up the Naval Observatory, not far from these night rides.  In your fifties, everyone has come to grasp everyone else's craziness and their own, and he found it not unfitting, and not unwarranted, to go out for such solitary trips, unprotected by bodyguards, on up to the Soldier's Home, where once someone put a rifle bullet through his top hat.  Something he shrugged off.  That's how wartime is; people get crazy.  Better to avoid, if you can.  If you can.

You're crazy, you know, your wife is crazy, each in an understandable and coming-by-it-honestly-enough through some curse of depth and talent and spiritual intelligence and intuition;  the whole country of people has gone crazy, and now the most crazy thing, war, is burning like an unstoppable fire, odd because you really just wanted to do something peaceful and biblical, which is to free enslaved peoples, and here you go, Bloody Kansas, this whole uproar just primarily because you were picked to be President, Jesus Christ, why not go out for a nighttime ride to clear the head and at least feel good in an animal way.  Let the rest of this bemudded town disappear below and behind my back as I gain wind, and find that fresh air that lets me deal with it all.  Thunderstorms, I do not care, I welcome, and shoot at me, I don't give a rat's hind as they say.

One day I'll be dead, anyway, and whatever small seeds this old prairie boy is able to plant through is beleaguered words, let it happen, the torch has been passed to a new generation, so it will be one day said, remembering my ghost.


Nighttime, if you live here in this powerful and protected town, is for those who live here, accustomed to it, locals, seasoned veterans.  Big cars darkly muffling prowl through U Street near the Chili Bowl, the old jazz corridors, people adept at being out and talking to each other as one big family, carnivores of fun and no small flirtations...  and in more sedate parts of the Northwest part of the town, where there are significant woodlands and fresh air of a sort lower than Lincoln's cottage at the Soldiers Home, near a favorite tree, and why not liberate yourself from the expectations of minds and punditry and let the imagined and the imagination speak to the silent night filled with sounds like running streams, unbroken by the nagging and frightful sounds of rumbling traffic, sirens, a speeding semi duty of U.S. Postal Service braking to pass through Sheridan Circle early before even the hint of first light.  Dave Chappelle could joke about the contrast, the white guy's night out, versus "his colored friend," that's a joke.  Lincoln,  you know goddamn right and well, loved a good laugh, a good carousing late at night to relieve things, much as he is portrayed a bit dry,  Well, to be so dry and noble, you know the fellows keel ran pretty deep, knowing and partaking in the depths of the waters of how men are, drinking, talking to women, telling stories...  The Second Inaugural doesn't come from playing paddy cake paddy cake, or a strict strictly legal mind.  He wouldn't have chosen to leave the Address at the Cemetery up at Gettysburg to be so brief, had he no sense of humor, and an Irish one at that.  Eloquence is a balance, my friends.  You got to know the shit to know the stars, as any country singer will tell you, vestiges of the earlier America and still a large part of its working soul.  Lincoln was not a plastic bullshitter, waving the flag for the annual Memorial Day concert on the National Mall.  Funny they even made a monument lit at night, such a character, who really is too interesting to be lit at night, who would have preferred some anonymity.


(And he wouldn't have cared so much about himself getting shot, but for the inconvenience of it, so much as them who are supposed to know such things plainly obvious about such men, as much as them letting that poor Kennedy boy get shot as a sitting duck, when they knew Oswald had neon signs about him...)


Hemingway, it strikes me, as I roll free, feeling that excellent feeling of being light and airborne and comfortable on the more modern of my two road bikes, the Cannondale, tires juiced up to near high pressure, my headlamp charged enough, just hungry for getting out into the night, Hemingway's stories are parables of fame, in one way or another.  He was a gentleman coming from a 19th Century literary tradition of gentleman like Turgenev and Balzac.  The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber speaks of the decay inherent in running the literary business successfully, as do even early short stories hint, like the one about getting caught for poaching game out of season, having to hide out.

It was important for him to make a success out of himself at that venue, and indeed he succeeded, well enough and with some magnificence.  He is an artist, a good will ambassador, deserving credit for taking the time to explore human existence in a developed and sensitive way.  There is spiritual stuff in him, but more as a tale to tell than a complete focus on it.  He reached out to portray the lives of the poor and the injured and with some sensitivity toward those who live in cities, habits of cafe life, and those of the country side.

Hemingway's calling is his, and he hit it in a maturing form.

But knowing what you want to be at age twenty is different from the calling that happens further on in life.  Would one now know, these days, the full nature and meaning of their calling?  I wouldn't have known then, like I knew almost the opposite, even as I kept on.