The Awakening
is one of my favorite sculptures... ever. When I was in my starry-eyed early twenties, my family and I came to D.C. on a vacation and we saw this stature for the first time. I have an embarrassingly young looking photo of me sitting in his left hand from that trip. For the first twenty seven years of his frozen stupor, he was located at Haines Point in Potomac Park (Now he's been moved to the National Harbor.). I've been to see him on sunny days, and extremely late at night when I'm pretty sure it wasn't safe to be anywhere near him. He's always reminded me of that quote from Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."