There was a time when I was tooling through the National Mall when I thought I was going to write about words.

I had taken the time to read Lincoln’s second inaugural address at his memorial, and had moved on to read Jefferson’s words regarding religious freedom at his, but then I ran out of text. Most of the monuments – and especially the newer ones – don’t seem much interested in words.

FDR’s Memorial has a few catch phrases carved in it – the stone equivalent of soundbites – but there isn’t much there to sink your teeth into, if that’s what rocks your world.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is famous for its names, of course, but carefully avoids any overt opinions, pro or con, and so on with the other war memorials., which favor a collective identity over an individual one.

So I gave it up and decided to just enjoy collecting my darn National Park Passport cancellations. In Washington, D.C., you can get a new one for just about every block you travel, and I – who had been happy to collect 15 in a year, now found I could collect more than that in a weekend.

The park cancellations – sometimes called stamps, but that’s a little confusing because you can also collect park stickers – feature the name of the site, the location and the date you visited. They go into a passport book that’s supposed to encourage park attendance. Certainly it has worked with me, and sometimes I’m almost as happy to get a new ink smear in my book as I am to actually learn anything at the site.

But there are risks to any hobby, and mine is no exception. The first great horror, of course, is to find the visitor’s center closed because the curator is sick, which happened to me way out at Kalaupapa National Historical Park on the island of Molokai. And another is to totally botch the imprint so you can hardly read what it says.

Happily in Washington, D.C., a bad cancellation hardly matters. There’s a stamp for the National Mall and another one for the National Mall and Memorial Parks; officially they aren’t exactly the same thing, but even the NPS website conflates them to include just about everything from the foot of the capitol steps down to the Lincoln Memorial, over to the Old Post Office and up Pennsylvania Avenue. Then there’s another stamp for the National Capital Region – whatever that means.

So one stamp represents many, the many become one, and somewhere in there is probably a national metaphor only slightly more appropriate than the realization that, in my book at least, Washington represents a lot of red ink.