The Library of Congress

I took a trip to the Library of Congress Thursday. 

The National Library Service (NLS) for the Blind and Physically Handicapped was celebrating 80 years of talking books. Our neighbor, Trudy Pickrel, is the president of the Maryland Federation of the Blind and has adopted 3 blind children. She was taking the oldest of those children, Brandon who is 9, to the Library of Congress - where the celebration was being held - to talk to reporters about how he, as a child, liked the digitally recorded books and which ones were his favorite, etc. I was just along as a helper. Trudy also took her blind daughter (she is 5 and has numerous handicaps beyond her partial blindness), and she asked me to go along to help with Maria.

It was a very neat experience. We didn't actually go into the library portion of the Thomas Jefferson building (where all the books are kept). But we did get a personal tour of the Young Readers Center downstairs. 

The architecture in the building was amazing. The marble floors and columns, the sculptures, and paintings. It made me think of a building/era in which Thomas Jefferson would have felt perfectly at home! 

That was the first time I remember being in Washington D.C. Aunt Lois took us to the D.C. Zoo a couple times, but that was so long ago, I remember very very little about it. The Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress is directly across the street from the Capitol, so I got to see the Capitol Building for the first time too. 

Actually, it was my first time for a lot of neat things: Being on Capitol Hill and in the Library of Congress, hearing the 13th Librarian of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington) speak, riding a metro, having to open my purse for a security guard (not that there was anything wrong, just something we had to do to get out of the building!). 

When we were headed back to the metro, it was around lunch time, and we walked right past the Capitol Hill Club. There were tons of big black Escalades and fancy cars. Trudy was like, all the congressmen are coming out to lunch. There was no one person that had a huge entourage or anything, so I don't think I saw anybody singularly important...but who knows :) It was cool anyway!!!

We had to get up at 4 a.m. to get there, and it was freezing cold during our trips between the van, metro stations and Library, but it was one of those experiences that makes it totally worth it!