Yesterday there was a photo on the front page of the local daily rag of a blond chick at a hockey gang waving a handful of bloody intestines at the players. Imagine that: you’re out there on the ice, wacking the puck around, and you look up, and some babe is enthusiastically waving the still-steaming entrails of her boyfriend. Was it just that her hands were cold? Or is it a love-offering?

Scanning the caption, it turned out to be a red pompom, but the whole thing made me happy, if only briefly.

I was loading up a bag of stuff to take to Goodwill and in the inside pocket of a jacket with a busted zipper (yeah, that’s the kind of crap we unload on the poor) I found some notes I took when we went to Mount Vernon.

“Mount Vernon.” Imagine if that was a verb instead of a noun. Where would you print an instruction like that?

It (Mount Vernon) was George Washington’s estate. It’s 20 minutes drive through a 7-11 suburb south of DC to his lil’ slave village on the Potomac. They (the slaves) are buried in a patch of woods 20 meters or so from His modest little mausoleum. It’s not too clear where exactly (George didn’t have the holes they put the bodies in marked), but there’s a sign by the path that assures visitors that the birch and maples that grow there are fertilized by genuine, if nameless, black worker types.

Regardless, a noble place. Like the little video by the entrance says: “one man, one leader, one cause.”

The place itself is whatever. A big rickety white house on the edge of a bluff above the river. We were toured around it by a tetchy middle-aged woman who seemed to have collected a lot of free samplers from the Mall Girl makeup company, and used them all at once.

We paused just inside the door of George’s dining room—a high ceilinged room, with lots of plaster wingy-dings and bright green walls—and she laced up her fingers over her tummy and told us (a motley little gang of newlywed Americans) to “consider the 18th century.” I squinched my eyes and tried my best, and missed what she said next, and didn’t write anything else down until I caught “…he had no choice—there were too many people in the pie.”

So then we toured the grounds. Tried not to tread on buried black folks. Stopped by the gift shop for a coffee mug and went to the toilet, which is decorated with a photo of Pandit Nehru giving a VOA interview outside George’s house. Went by the museum.

Good fun, the museum. The highlight of course, is a set of false teeth worn by George. They’re not made of wood, as I was led to believe as a little boy. No, only the real thing would do for George. Yep, that’s right: the man’s false teeth were real.

I’ve been wondering ever since whether, if you have to have a tooth pulled because it’s rotten, you can turn around and set it in a piece of cherry wood and poodang! you’re good to go—some rich guy has new teeth. Or whether rotten teeth (the kind of teeth you have pulled voluntarily because they’re no good) are, well, no good. In which case, where did these teeth come from?