I was in Washington DC this past week for a wedding. The wedding of Order member Will Slocombe, in fact. Mazel tov, young man!
I haven’t visited our nation’s capital since I was a bright-eyed 17-year-old touring Georgetown University because I was convinced I wanted to work with the ACLU as a constitutional lawyer. As a note: holy SHIT 17-year-olds can be really really wrong about what they want to do with their lives.
My amazing literary agency also happens to be in DC. My agent Anna Sproul-Latimer took me to have some delicious Ethiopian food and then we drove to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland.
Oh look, it’s fragments of Abraham Lincoln’s skull and the “bullet that took the president’s life.” Right there on display! With all the people at the Lincoln Memorial and Ford’s Theater, you would think that Lincoln’s death was big business. But hardly anyone was here at the museum. Can we not face much more tangible, literal memento mori like skull fragments or do people simply not know this treasure trove is here?
You can look into a little window where scientists are preparing organs. “I’ll just take a snap of these organs” I said to myself. And I did. That’s the end of that story.
We’ll end with slices from Einstein’s brain. Seriously, there are super famous corpse parts here. If you can get to Silver Spring, go! Five stars. Take the kids!