COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Did you miss me? I missed you. Well, some more than others. I was in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol. Ever wonder why Washington is an independent district instead of a city in one of the states next door like Virginia or Maryland? Because the Founding Fathers may have worn silly clothes, but they were really smart and didn’t want one state to have more influence over the federal government than any other. More on the Founders and their clothes in a moment.

I get back to Washington pretty often. This time it was as part of a delegation from the Orange County Transportation Authority and the Orange County Business Council. For three days, we chug up and down the Hill, urging senators and members of Congress to send back as much of the gazillion dollars we pay in federal taxes as they can so we can do things like dredge Newport Harbor and widen the 91 Freeway, both of which are excellent things to do. But even while I’m chugging, I try to stop and smell the cherry blossoms as much as possible.

Washington is an exciting place to be, anytime, for any reason — the ultimate power center, with images you’ve seen all your life: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol. Even if you don’t give a gnat’s eyelash about politics, any American who visits Washington and doesn’t feel moved needs to get his or her mover checked.

We were lucky enough to catch the tail end of the cherry blossoms — the yearly fireworks spectacle of white and pink blossoms that look too perfect and too beautiful to be real. So how did all those Japanese cherry trees get to Washington?

It all started with a number of cherry trees that were sent to Washington in 1912 as a gesture of friendship from the mayor of Tokyo. First Lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first two trees near the Jefferson Memorial on March 27, 1912.

Nearly a century later, there are some 3,700 cherry trees in Washington. They only strut their stuff once a year, usually in mid-April, but once you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it. A nice friends-helping-friends touch to the story is that on a number of occasions, cuttings from the Washington, D.C. trees have been sent back to Japan and replanted there to replace trees that were destroyed in floods or storms.

And that brings us to the Thomas Jefferson nickel. It’s been around forever, you probably have one in your purse or your pocket — TJ on one side, his legendary home at Monticello on the other. My wife and I have been around the track in Virginia quite a few times — Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, a number of Civil War battle sites. But we never made it to Monticello, mostly because you really need a full day to get there and back to Washington, which is about three hours by car each way.

No matter. It’s worth it, to the power of 10. The home is impressive enough, but the location is a stunner — perched atop a towering hill with a 360-degree of the surrounding Virginia countryside. The view is still very much as Jefferson saw it with little evidence of the here and now.

Like most of his colleagues, Jefferson was about as Renaissance as a Renaissance man could get, which is very Renaissance. An expert architect, designer and botanist, plus about 704 other things, he designed every detail of the house and the sprawling gardens himself, from the signature white dome to which bulbs were to be planted in which flower beds.

Inventions? I’ll give you inventions. Not quite Ben Franklin, but still amazing. The two pens attached to a floating bracket on his desk caught my eye. Jefferson knew that virtually everything he wrote would become the building blocks of our history. As he wrote with one pen, the other traced an exact copy on a separate page, i.e., one of the first copy machines. Jefferson also designed the master closets as large dumbwaiters. One half held warm weather clothes and the other cold weather clothes. As the seasons changed, the two wardrobes could be switched out entirely with a few tugs on a rope. Those gadgets might seem frivolous for the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, but they show how accomplished, brilliant and passionately curious they were about everything that life has to offer.

The best Thomas Jefferson story is one that I’ve been telling for years. Believe it or not, both Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, fifty years to the day after the Declaration was signed — July 4, 1826.

The two men, who started their careers are close friends and ended them as archrivals, asked a number of times on their deathbed if the other had passed. Jefferson died first, but the news didn’t get to Adams’ bedside in time. Within the hour, John Adams whispered two words with his dying breath: “Jefferson survives.”

So that’s it then — cherry blossoms, Thomas Jefferson and the 91 Freeway. They all mean something, I’m just not sure what. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.