Family changes plans for now
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June 2017 was supposed to be the month my 13-year-old son Gideon went to Washington, D.C. on a youth tour.
For reasons that had nothing to do with recent gunfire or the current occupant of the Oval Office (or the fact that “draining the swamp” might be too overpowering a concept for a lad who still cringes at parental suggestions about “emptying the cat litterbox” or “picking up that HazMat suit from your bedroom floor”), my wife and I decided to cancel our plans and get a refund.
Gideon made a quick tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History with us four years ago and stands a chance of winning a free D.C. trip between his junior and senior years, so he’s handling his disappointment well.
He has his karate class, his talk radio favorites (Phil Valentine and Mark Levin) and his Dean Martin impersonations to keep him busy. If he sang “That’s Amore” inside The Beltway, the lyrics would have to be changed to “When the moon hits your eye/Like a big pizza pie/That’s a golden opportunity for collusion between the SpaceX lobby, the hitting-in-the-eye lobby and the pizza lobby.”