This past summer my family made a trip to Washington, DC. The feeling was that the kids were of an age (15 and 11) for a hefty civics lesson. When we asked them if this was what they wanted to do, they, who seldom unite on any issue, responded with a lusty No!

Nevertheless, their mother and I knew it would be good for them, so we made them go.

The week that followed, which should have been fun-filled and instructive, was instead a kind of death march with backpacks.

Washington, sporting 95 degree heat the week we were there, was plagued with drought. The Reflecting Pool had nearly evaporated. The Ellipse was a dust bowl. Armed Guards sat slumped by their revolving doors. Even the rhinos in the National Zoo rolled their billiard ball eyes skyward in misery, as if to ask, How long?

And the scaffold was -- how shall I say this -- beautiful. It gave the impression that the monument had been turned inside out, and the vast internal honeycombing of squares, hexagons and triangles was laid bare to the eye. And the whole thing was draped in a sexy nylon mesh that inevitably put one in mind of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate.

At night, it was positively bewitching, as the restoration projects lights were switched on, and all that interesting geometry was illuminated. All the architecture and statuary of Washington, DC wants you to think reverent thoughts about the republic. But this one made you want to fall to your knees.

So imagine my delight, on returning with my insurrectionary crew to Minnesota, to learn that the city of Minneapolis is negotiating to buy the scaffolding and set it up as a monument in its own right, in my old Fair Oaks neighborhood, near the art museum.

What a lovely idea -- taking the package a gift came in, and turning the package into another gift. Like the heavy corrugated box our Kelvinator refrigerator was delivered in back in 1958. The big copper staples were killers, but I seriously considered making that box my official residence through the second grade.

And it follows a trend that has been deepening all my life, erecting castoffs onto the pedestal of art. Frank Lloyd Wright legitimized plywood. Andy Warhol and Cristo did it for Brillo Pads and Saran Wrap. Now we are making monuments out of packing materials.

It was built by Wilbur Foshay ostensibly as an homage to the democratic champion George Washington, but then he named it after that other great American, himself. Though the tower was the colossus of Minneapolis, altitudinally speaking, it came up short in the cachet department. Being an office building, it had hundreds of windows, which make it look like a space ship about to blast off, with all the passengers dropping streamers and waving to their relatives.

But I am looking forward to seeing the Washington Monument's scaffold erected across town. It will be yet another conceptual wonder of the Midwest, like Aksarben Stadium in Omaha (it's the state's name, spelled backward).

It is like the skin a garden snake sheds as it grows, and leaves behind to fascinate and mystify.

We grownups will gaze up at the obelisk's diamondback patterns, and make it a teachable moment to the young. It will be a symbol of all that is right with America. Freedom, imagination, and resourcefulness. No need to travel to Washington, DC any more -- we've got the box it came in in Minneapolis!

But I remember my family pausing at the National Archives, after a long trudge through the theme park we call our nation's capitol. The kids peered through the thick glass at the climate-controlled documents that bless our way of life, while I bludgeoned them with the view of Washington and other signatories, that it is the unalienable right of the oppressed to throw off a tyrant.

And they looked up at me, and I could almost see the little light switching on inside their heads. What a look it was. It informed me that I had planted the seed of my own undoing. Like I didn't already know that.