Visiting the Montagues and Calders (and Lobbying, too)

 

Gretta the Lobbyist.  My mission, on my February 10, 2015, trip to Washington, D.C., was to attend the NAIOP Leadership and Legislative Retreat, and lobby Utah's senators and congressmen about national real estate issues.  The highlight of the trip, though, was spending an afternoon with Kent and Toshiko Calder, their daughter Mari, and Mari's children, Cornelius and Francis.

Toshiko drove me to Mari's apartment, where the sister of Mari's husband, John Montague, had just brought dinner.  Mari has a new baby boy, Francis, and Mari's relatives are helping out.  Mari's sister-in-law held Francis and her husband held Cornelius.  John was still at work as a tax lawyer with one of Washington D.C.'s large firms.  Cornelius has just turned two.  He describes himself to his parents as "Corn nut.  Corn nut is King."   Cornelius also pretends to be a ghost, a vampire, and a mermaid.

I visited Kent at his office at a division of Johns Hopkins University located in downtown Washington.  Kent is in charge of Asian studies at SAIS,  Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.  When I visited, he was holding office hours with his students and faculty.  I met several Korean graduate students ("Very bright," Toshiko assured me), as well as a woman who specializes in Mongolian studies and "has a good network of Mongolians."

Toshiko is a gentle, self-effacing woman with her relatives, but she is also a distinguished scholar in her own right.  She teaches Japanese language classes at SAIS, translates Kent's books into Japanese ("I hear they read even better in Japanese than English," an American ambassador to Japan who knows Kent commented), and travels the world participating in conferences on educating children to preserve their heritage languages.  Toshiko has spent many years supervising a school in Princeton which teaches Japanese language and culture to Japanese children living in America. 

I attended two days of meetings at the NAIOP retreat.  I heard speeches by a senator, a political analyst, and experts on new federal legislation involving wetlands, low income housing, and environmental contamination.    

I attended a fund-raising banquet at which a drone was raffled off.  It swooped around the banquet hall of the Capitol Hilton. 

On the second day of the meetings, the chapter representatives met with their Congressmen and told them about NAIOP's legislative positions.  Members of our group met with all of Utah's Congressmen.  I especially enjoyed meeting Orrin Hatch, fresh from the Senate floor and looking very senatorial in his pinstripe suit.