To my fellow tour guides, I will miss you

I believe I noticed a while back that someone else wrote about their experiences with fellow interns and how that became a major bright spot in their internship, and I must say, I agree. It is only a select group of people in this world who understand what it means to be a tour guide in a Masonic temple, in all its glory, and you can’t really make connections like that just any ol’ place.

Last week we all began to say goodbyes as people went back to their respective parts of the country for Christmas, a few of whom will be abroad next semester, and some of whom will not be back at the Temple at all. I thought about our first tours, when we had to rely on notes and sometimes made some things up out of panic (you don’t realize it until you’re in that position, but it is not fun to be a tour guide and not know how to answer a question for somebody–you can’t just say, “I don’t know!) until we learned it’s just simpler to ask someone who does know, and generally all parties involved will understand.

I thought about our shared stories of the odd visitors,  like the guy who kneeled and told Grand Commander their souls were touching (yipes), the Russian man who took his shoes off before the tour even began, the man who claimed to see images of other things in regular portraits (though he couldn’t really say what the things were), and of course all the people looking for general Mason secrets and lore. I learned that sometimes it’s best to let them believe what they want to believe. You can’t talk someone out of thinking Masons are ruling the world. Eh, it just takes too much time, and you don’t want to ruin their fun.

We shared tour duty, phone duty, gift shop duty, smiling at strangers duty, and altogether gave the Temple a public face. It was a very cool crew to work with, and I think we will all have a great fondness for Masons that perhaps we never knew we needed or would have.

Today I was at Mt. Vernon. I took a picture of George Washington in his Masonic Regalia and was even able to spout some Mason-Washington facts to my friends. It’s kind of fun to think that this history and all the people behind it will follow me into the future, and that the world of Masonry is no longer a mystery. Well, not entirely. I still haven’t been up the secret staircase that “leads to the organ!”

GW in his Masonic regalia!