Taking a little trip

Tomorrow my husband and I will take a train to Washington, D.C. Train travel in the US is pretty rare, at least in the part of the country where we live, and I’m a little bit giddy about the adventure. We’ll get to watch the countryside go by while reading and doing our own thing, and without having to worry about traffic or parking when we get there.

We have tickets to see the National Symphony Orchestra perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Kennedy Center in D.C. I was excited for this symphony in particular because it’s the one I’ve heard over and over again on the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I have lots of fond feelings about A Clockwork Orange, which I know is weird because it’s a messed up book and movie, but my Grandma had the soundtrack in her record collection and it was her favorite. The album cover is seared into my memory, and I love that my grandmother loved it. Whenever I hear Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” I think of both her and A Clockwork Orange.

Alas, thanks to Omicron, they switched our concert to Beethoven’s Third instead of his Ninth. The Ninth has an epic choral section that they didn’t want singers belting out in an enclosed space in the time of Covid. I’m slightly disappointed but not terribly. The Third Symphony is said by some to represent Beethoven grappling with his deafness and emerging whole on the other side, which still boggles the mind that this great composer couldn’t hear his own music. Going to the Kennedy Center and listening to the National Symphony Orchestra perform anything is a special event. We get to hear them perform Beethoven.

But that’s not all! We will have a lot of time to wander while we’re in Washington, and one of the first places we’re going to go when we get off the train is Fahrney’s Pens, a shop where US presidents and Washington Post columnists have bought their fountain pens. My husband gave me a Waterman from Fahrney’s for Christmas one year, which he ordered through the mail. In fact, I’ve done all of my pen and ink shopping by mail since I became enamored with fountain pens two years ago, and I can’t wait to go into a real shop and see real pens instead of browsing on a screen or in a paper catalog.

I’m not sure if I’ll take my laptop or if I’ll want to blog while we’re away, so whether I’ll actually blog every day in January remains to be seen. This post will mark 27 days in a row, which I’m pretty proud of regardless of what comes next.