At this time I would like to turn our attention to Day 2.

It began well. Suspiciously well, looking back on it. My wife rose early as
she is wont to do despite the luxury of time, because as Ben Franklin once
said, when you're early to bed and early to rise you can cut out a good 30
minutes of family time on either end of the day. Franklin might have bumped
that up to 45 had he known about Starbucks, which had a shop on the lower
floor of the cavernous, hexagonal mall into which our hotel was built,
and which, due to some snafu with my wife's order, gave her a free coffee
on the morning of Day 2.

That was it. Game over. Starbucks doesn't just give out free coffee without
making compensatory adjustments to your karma and the karma of those around
you that you're supposed to be loving and protecting. My wife should have
known this. She would have taken the free coffee either way, but I like to
think she would have warned the rest of us not to leave the hotel.

Unaware that anything in the cosmos was out of balance, we ate breakfast,
took the Metro into the heart of Washington and walked over to Pennsylvania
Avenue. At this point it was still an ordinary outing with children. Everybody
was whining, wanting to be carried, we didn't have enough snacks, it was hot,
people were dying of thirst, all five water fountains in the park outside
the White House were broken, they couldn't see the President, they wanted
to stay till he mowed his lawn, etc. The usual stuff.

The trouble started when we got to the Capitol building. As we were filing
through the security gauntlet I was stopped by large military personnel
holding what looked to this gunphobe like anti-tank weapons. The charge:
possession of baby food. I had about ten jars of Gerber pears in my backpack,
but apparently no baby food is allowed inside the Capitol building since
those behind the Great Strained Peas and Liver Mêlée of 2004 went and ruined
everything for the rest of us. My utter lack of a baby wasn't helping my
credibility, either; the MPs had seen my whole party go in ahead of me, the
youngest of which is almost 8. I would have to either ditch the pears in one
of the many convenient baby food disposal units or stay outside and become
separated from my family without a cell phone. The choice seemed obvious.

I stayed outside. You'll just have to trust me when I say I really really
needed those pears.

Plus I figured it wouldn't be too hard to hook up with my family again.
As I've learned from countless Scooby Doo episodes, when you get separated
from a group the first rule is to stay put and let them find you, not to
go wandering around randomly through the haunted Museum of Natural History
searching for Velma, Fred, and Daphne. But then I remembered that my family
couldn't find the Washington Monument if they banged into it snoot-first. They
have absolutely no sense of direction. So I disregarded the first rule and
began circumnavigating the building; according to the anti-tourist squad
the tourist exit was on the south side.

The Capitol Building is gigantic on a good day. It's like half a mile of marble
from end to end. On top of that it's surrounded by construction at the moment,
and since everything in Washington needs a security perimeter, including
construction sites, there was another buffer zone outside the construction
fence. And since that layer of security was itself under construction it
required its own security perimeter, and so on. I swear to God just walking
around that building was an eight mile hike. I lost sight of it several
times, despite the fact that it's the tallest structure in DC. When I finally
reached the south side I was told that tourists can also exit on the west side.

For 90 minutes I made sweeps between the south and west exits and the north
entrance. I was still alone, and beginning to panic. Meanwhile, I learned
later, inside the Capitol building my family was being accosted by a man
they called "The Crazy Guy", who was ranting about how he was going to kill
all the senators. They could tell right away he was crazy because the Senate
wasn't even in session that day. Where all the large military personnel were
at that point I don't know, but because Crazy Guy wasn't packing any baby
food I guess he wasn't seen as a threat. He was allowed into the gallery
and was even given a chance to speak on the floor of the House, making an
excellent case for attacking the Confederate Armies at Appomattox and the
teaching of intelligent design.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset. In Part 3 of "Washington Story" a family is
found, a lunch is lost, and John hangs on to his pears.