The closest city to the wedding is Fredricksburg, Virginia. I’ve been in Fredricksburg once before, during Christmas vacation week of 1967, staying at the home of the guy with whom I shared an office the summer before when we were teaching math in the pre-freshman program at Tuskegee Institute. I don’t remember much of the town in general, except for playing pool at a pool hall downtown and going out to drink (a lot of!) beer one evening.
I’m sure the Fredricksburg area has grown tremendously in the last 40 years. It’s about sixty miles south of Washington. There are strip malls stretching for three miles out from it in all directions, or at least all directions that we went. If Nashua, New Hampshire, is the outermost suburb of Boston, Fredricksburg plays that role for Washington. Traffic was crawling from the point where I-95 left the Washington Beltway all the way to and past the Fredricksburg exit.
We stayed (on Friday night) at the Fredricksburg Colonial Inn, a long two story motel-shaped building that’s totally unremarkable from the outside but not at all like a motel inside. It’s all furnished with antiques and decorated with pictures of the Civil War — Robert E. Lee at four different ages, for instance. I’m sure every room is different, because, after all, you just don’t find thirty of the same antique dresser to furnish every room the same.
The pictures of Robert E. Lee are right in character for the city. To find our way to the groom’s family’s house, we had to turn left on a main street, Jefferson Davis Avenue.