One day in Philadelphia

  • Quick stopover in Philadel­phia. I’ve just got one day in town after a friend’s wed­ding — just time enough to see Con­sti­tu­tional stuff, eat some Tasty­cakes and help pro­tect Ben­jamin Franklin’s gravestone.

    Mr. & Mrs Loud request the honor …

    This por­tion of the trip started off a lit­tle strange. We checked in at nearly mid­night last night and the cav­ernous lobby of the hotel was nearly full of peo­ple rang­ing in age from 8 to 50, dressed up, loung­ing about, milling in bunches, pretty much shout­ing the whole time. Appar­ently there was a wed­ding and fam­ily was gath­er­ing from all over. I admit that I don’t under­stand extended fam­ily on this scale. Hav­ing never had any extended fam­ily event that fea­tured more than 20 of us, I am obvi­ously miss­ing some con­text here. All the same, this just couldn’t have been a nor­mal union of nor­mal peo­ple. I decided that it had to be the long-awaited join­ing of the Loud fam­ily (fam­ily motto: “WHAT?!”) and the Huge fam­ily (cur­rent pop­u­la­tion: 13,000 with 17 more expected by Tues­day). How lovely it was that they could all attend! The Louds made sure that noth­ing ever hap­pened in a con­ver­sa­tional tone. The Huges guar­an­teed that all open areas weren’t open.

    This may sound very ungen­er­ous of me, but I grew a lit­tle unchar­i­ta­ble about the Loud, Huge affair when two of the ele­va­tors broke down and I had to take more than my quota of claus­tro­pho­bic ele­va­tor rides lis­ten­ing to them regal­ing each other in boom­ing voices with hilar­i­ous episodes from their hilar­i­ous exis­tence. “I do like fam­ily,” I told myself with grim defen­sive­ness. “My fam­ily.”

    Just as well we had plans to go sight­see­ing anyway.

    Get­ting Independent

    Greg had asked me what I wanted to do in Philadel­phia, and I had Web-searched around. We have already seen Inde­pen­dence Hall and the Lib­erty Bell on pre­vi­ous occa­sions, and taken in some other main attrac­tions besides. The city is full of muse­ums, as nearly all great cities are, and they’re prob­a­bly all good. But the con­sen­sus of dif­fer­ent Web-pages seemed to point to the Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter, so that got the bulk of our tourist-y attention.

    After all, Philadel­phia has a unique claim to being the birth­place of Amer­ica as a nation built on an idea and an exper­i­ment. To go there on a brief stay and not par­take of some of that “We, the peo­ple” ambiance seemed like it would’ve been such a waste.

    And it turned out to be an excel­lent choice. The Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter is a sort of liv­ing museum. It exists just to pro­mote the under­stand­ing of what the Con­sti­tu­tion did mean and does mean. To start this, they’ve got a nicely done show that goes over the his­tory and starts the main ques­tion going: what does it mean to live in a demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic? How does it work (assum­ing that it does work)? What are the prob­lems and what’s the sys­tem for get­ting them solved?

    And then to help you begin to answer those ques­tions, or at least come up with oth­ers of your own, the show exits you out into a series of inter­ac­tive exhibits. You can see glid­ing minia­ture por­traits of hun­dreds of Amer­i­cans through­out his­tory and click on them to bring up their sto­ries. You can see an alcove full of the books that influ­enced the found­ing fathers and touch the binders to hear excerpts. You can watch a film of peo­ple tak­ing the oath of cit­i­zen­ship. You can lis­ten to Ben Stein (the “any­one? any­one?” teacher from Fer­ris Bueller and also a Ronald Rea­gan speech writer) answer ques­tions about the Con­sti­tu­tion in a cof­fee shop setting.

    And so on and so on. It was very mov­ing and very edu­ca­tional, and how often do those go together? The best thing about hav­ing dis­cov­ered this museum is that it makes the deci­sion of what to do next time we’re in Philly much eas­ier. I’m not think­ing I’ll feel like I’ve really done the Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter right until I’ve seen it three more times at least.

    Whistling past the graveyard

    There are lots of other things to do within easy walk­ing dis­tance. Inde­pen­dence Hall was look­ing stately and radi­ant in the late after­noon as we left. But I had a sort of idea that I wanted to see if I could get to Christ Church (founded in 1695 and still oper­at­ing today) and the Christ Church Bur­ial Ground. The Bur­ial Ground was clos­est to us, but their next tour was almost an hour away, so we went on walk­a­bout. I think I had it in mind to get to Christ Church five blocks away or so, or even Betsy Ross’ house on the way, but I real­ized that time would get away from us if we did, so we set­tled for just tak­ing in the air, remark­ing to each other on how kindly the Novem­ber weather was being to us and turn­ing in at a serendip­i­tous deli to grab a sand­wich, birch beer and But­ter­scotch Krimpet. (One of the only things I miss from the East is Tasty­cakes. I’m not sure they’d be worth a trip just by them­selves, but they cer­tainly brighten things up once you’re here.)

    We didn’t make it all the way to Christ Church, but with whet­ted appetites, we saun­tered back to the colo­nial grave­yard feel­ing fine.

    “Please don’t take pen­nies from Franklin’s gravestone.”

    The Christ Church Bur­ial Ground has 1400 or so stones, the ear­li­est of which date back to 1710, and serves as the final rest­ing place for 3000 or so souls. The dis­crep­ancy in num­ber owes partly to a large num­ber buried in a mass grave, for rea­sons they don’t know, and also to the cus­tom of bury­ing mem­bers of the same fam­ily stacked on top of each other with one stone updated to reflect who had been interred. It seemed like a quaint and um, earthy way to do things (no pun intended), but eco­nom­i­cal and unro­man­tic, both of which seemed to char­ac­ter­ize colo­nial Amer­i­cans’ ideas about how death should be han­dled. When you are hav­ing ongo­ing yel­low fever epi­demics (the last of which killed off nearly 20% of the pop­u­la­tion) you’ve lit­tle time for niceties.

    Or embalm­ing, for that mat­ter. Quite a num­ber of grave­stones were slabs laid over the length of the grave and raised up on bricks which had spaces in them “so that the gases could escape” our tour guide Linda told us. Appar­ently, the colonists felt that Euro­peans had got­ten far too frilly with their han­dling of life’s final­ity, and they weren’t inter­ested in any­thing that pre­vented decom­po­si­tion. Bod­ies were cov­ered in shrouds, buried with­out a cof­fin and left to nature’s devices.

    As we were strolling on our tour, a teenage boy got down on all fours so that he could peek into one of the holes in the brick. Linda sighed and told us that peo­ple do that all the time, appar­ently believ­ing that they’ll really see some­thing neat-o. Greg and Linda decided that it should be easy to devise a solar-powered motion detec­tor that would acti­vate a robotic hand to reach out and grab those peo­ple. I’d give a hefty sum to see that in action.

    As far as silly behav­ior in the grave­yard, though, the best was yet to come. The bur­ial ground is just a small, quiet area punc­tu­ated by some ven­er­a­ble old trees. As the sun set behind the Philadel­phia sky­line, squir­rels scrab­bled about for acorns and spar­rows hopped on the stone wall around it. You would have thought that it was easy enough to dis­cern that this is a place for a lit­tle reflec­tion and respect. But as we wound up the tour at Ben­jamin Franklin’s grave, we had to share the space with a strange father and son who seemed to want noth­ing more than to take photo after photo of the son pos­ing next to Franklin’s grave.

    That alone wasn’t tacky, just strange. Who am I to judge? Maybe the guy has just fin­ished writ­ing a 12-volume novel of Franklin’s favorite recipes or some­thing. But to check on the 33rd pic­ture on his father’s cam­era, the young man strode over the grave­stone next to it. He just clomped right over it like it was a paving stone and then looked sur­prised and a lit­tle huffy when Linda told him not to do that. Hon­estly, how dumb can peo­ple be?

    As if to answer that ques­tion, another young man reached through the iron gate and tried to take one of the pen­nies that had been thrown on the grave slab.

    Now, I don’t know why peo­ple have strange impulses to do things like toss pen­nies on Franklin’s grave in the first place. It’s not some­thing that seems like a good idea to me. Linda said that it’s a sort of Philadel­phia tra­di­tion and she thought it might have some­thing to do with Franklin’s canard that a penny saved is a penny earned. Per­son­ally, I just think it’s one of those things that peo­ple do with­out really know­ing why. We toss pen­nies on things, into things, at things. We toss them in foun­tains and into museum exhibits we can’t reach — do we think we’re estab­lish­ing some sort of own­er­ship, or send­ing out a satel­lite? Who knows, but Franklin’s grave comes in for its share and had twenty-five cents worth of pen­nies, and even a dime from one big spender.

    And this mope was reach­ing through the fence to try to get one, with the tour guide and two aston­ished Mis­souri­ans look­ing on. When he couldn’t reach it, he even had the nerve to ask if we could give him one.

    “Please don’t take pen­nies from Franklin’s grave,” Linda said, quite sen­si­bly I thought.

    “Oh,” he said, in sud­den real­iza­tion that we were the sort of weird peo­ple that frowned on petty lar­ceny in the grave­yard. “It’s for a scav­enger hunt.”

    “I know,” said Linda. Appar­ently the vis­it­ing con­ven­tion of civil engi­neers had thought this up to keep the con­ven­tion­eers in stitches. Not sure they’d really con­sid­ered how that hilar­i­ous under­tak­ing (no pun intended again) would be per­ceived, but oh well.. “So you’ve got three choices: You can skip it, you can lie, or you can put a penny on the grave and then take it off again.”

    In the end, our scav­enger hunter took the last option, even pay­ing Ben the com­pli­ment of throw­ing addi­tional change on top of the grave to show the depth of his respect for our found­ing fathers. Peo­ple are very strange sometimes.

    Well, that’s it for the day so far. Greg has grabbed a quick after­noon nap, so it must be time to wake him up so he can take me to the great Caribbean restau­rant for a mojito. If we head out now, we might be able to stuff our­selves onto an ele­va­tor with the Huges and Louds on the way to their post-rehearsal square dance and horse­shoe throw.

    That would be dandy.


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    November 5th, 2006 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Word­mama 11.05.2006

    I like the idea of Franklin run­ning a give-a-penny take-a-penny sort of grave. Although you’re right, the logic of throw­ing spare change on his grave escapes me. Throw­ing a penny into a foun­tain is fun — the water sploops, your penny wafts to the bot­tom, you’ve just inter­acted with Art. But what does a penny do on a slab? Bounces a bit, maybe, and Ben sighs a lit­tle and tries to go back to sleep.

  • Grace

    “… Ben tries to go back to sleep.” — So per­haps a motion-activated record­ing that shouted out “WILL YOU KNOCK OFF THAT RACKET?” would be the thing.

    The tour guide seemed philo­soph­i­cal about the “tra­di­tion,” but she did point out that it doesn’t make any sense to toss pen­nies on Franklin’s grave with the notion that you’re pay­ing homage to “a penny saved.”

    I actu­ally think peo­ple fling their stu­pid pen­nies around just because the dang things are use­less for every­thing else. Nobody wants them, not even toll booths. Might as well throw them at dead peo­ple who can’t complain.

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