On the road with my 13 yer old daughter… marching for stricter gun laws in DC, learning about the holocaust, and getting to know one another as adults

In an attempt to further radicalize my 13 year old daughter, I whisked her away on a last-minute road trip to D.C. Friday afternoon so that we could attend the big March for Our Lives demonstration. Having spent much of the past few days behind the wheel, I’m pretty exhausted at the moment, but I wanted to share a few quick thoughts and photos.

1. This was the longest trip Clementine and I have ever been on together, without the rest of the family. I’m not sure how much she enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. While I think, generally speaking, we have a pretty decent relationship, there’s nothing like spending 24 hours trapped in the same small car with one another to bring two people closer together. And I’m incredibly happy that things worked out so that we could do it. We not only had an opportunity talk at length about everything from middle school drama to the current state of American politics, but we were also able to catch up on a few podcasts, listening, among other things, to the Pod Save America interview with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who planned the DC march and the Slow Burn episode about Martha Mitchell. [I was surprised to learn both how much Clementine knew about the current gun control movement, and how little she knew about Watergate.] Here we are, post-march, at the Lincoln Memorial. [I’ve been thinking a lot about Lincoln lately, and I’d wanted to visit Ford’s Theater the following morning, on our way out of town, but there weren’t any tickets available.]

[note: As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t cover the eyes of my kids here because I’m ashamed of what they look like. I just decided several years ago that, barring some kind of blogging emergency, I would’t post photos of them here until they were adults. Too many bloggers, I think, cash in on the cuteness of their kids, and I didn’t want to be like that. And, more importantly, given how pervasive surveillance culture is in the world today, I thought they deserved to have at least a few years of something approaching privacy, before being thrust into this increasingly insane world of ours.]

2. For an event planned by students that the NRA has referred to as “violent radicals,” things never felt the least bit out of control during the march. There were no “urban riots.” No windows were smashed. There was just a lot of hugging and crying. As I told Clementine on the subway later that evening, if she’d licked my face, it would have tasted saltier than a country ham. [If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to listen to the speakers at the rally, and their absolutely heartbreaking stories of gun violence.] Here’s a photo of Clementine shortly after our arrival on Pennsylvania Avenue Saturday morning.

3. As we got to the march several hours before the event, we decided to jog over to the Hirshhorn and see their Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s exhibition, which, by the way, was really incredible… Here are just a few photos.

[above: Clementine trying to avoid looking directly at Ron Mueck’s “Big Man,” me contemplating Mark Bradford’s “Pickett’s Charge,” and “Untitled” by Barbara Kruger.]

4. I’d written out a sign on the top of a pizza box. It said, “Guillotines Not Guns.” Clementine, however, wouldn’t let me hold it up during the rally. She didn’t mind the implied threat to politicians. It was the fact that I’d written it on a grease-stained pizza box that bothered her. [There were a lot of really great signs at the march, but I didn’t get images of many, as I was worried that, if I took too many photos, my cell phone battery would die, and I wouldn’t be able to direct us back to the metro station so that we could catch a train back to the Maryland suburbs, where we were crashing with my incredibly generous aunt and uncle.]

5. I loved that, with the exception of the performers who sang songs during the March for Our Lives rally, everyone on the stage was a young person. There were no politicians. There were no movie stars. There were just young people who had been touched, in one way of the another, by gun violence. And it wasn’t just kids from Parkland, Florida either. The organizers had the good sense to widen the scope of the event, bringing not only the predominantly white and affluent students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to the stage, but also numerous students of color from places like Chicago and Los Angeles, driving home the point that kids in disadvantaged areas of our country have been living in fear of gun violence for decades before this current wave of suburban mass shootings brought the subject to the attention of the American press.

6. After the march, Clementine and I… I guess because I felt as though we hadn’t cried nearly enough… walked over to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. While I’d been there before, I’d never been with Clementine, and I felt as though she was finally of an age, having just read Elie Wiesel’s Night, where she could process it. In retrospect, maybe, after hearing all the stories of young people who had lost friends and relatives to gun violence, we should have done something that didn’t require us to contemplate the existence of death camps, but I thought it was important for us to take advantage of the fact that her little brother wasn’t around to discuss what can happen when racism is allowed to flourish, and when people terrified of uncertainty and change are encouraged to look for scapegoats.

Surreal experience at the Holocaust Museum yesterday after the march, watching an adult chaperone of a MAGA-hat-wearing student group complaining to security guards about the negative attention her teens were getting. pic.twitter.com/LdPTZ2Pb8c

— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) March 25, 2018

7. On the way back home, in hopes of counterbalancing all of the heavy stuff we’d encountered, we stopped in Morgantown, West Virginia, and visited their statue of Don Knotts. [I ask you, what little girl doesn’t love Don Knotts?]

8. After a quick lunch in Morgantown, we were on to Lexington, to visit with my 93 year old grandmother and look through her photo archives over hot chocolate. [I’m not sure what’s happening in this first photo, but it looks to me like my beloved grandmother, thinking that she’d accidentally killed me, is checking to see whether or not I have a pulse.]

9. In addition to spending an afternoon with Mimi Dorothy, the matriarch of our family, Clementine and I were also the guests of honor at a big spaghetti dinner at the home of yet another generous aunt and uncle, who were also kind enough to put us up for the night. Most of my cousins and their kids showed up, as well as my parents, who drove down from northern Kentucky. Many games were played. And many laughs were shared.

I could say more about all of these things, but, like I said at the start of this post, I’m exhausted… One last thing, though. I’m not sure if, in 20 years, Clementine will even remember this little, three-day trip of ours, and the 24 hours or so that we spent in the car together getting to know one another as adults, but I know I’ll always look back with fondness on my memories of hugging her in the middle of a closed-down Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by other parents and their kids, and talking with her about how, if anything is going to get fixed in this world, it’s going to be because her generation fought like hell to make it happen.