Me and DC: A Love Story: Part 1

This week, it’s been 18 years since I moved to DC–as long as I lived in Ohio.

When I arrived in DC on a brutally hot August day, I’d only been in the city once before, for orientation, and my mom and stepdad hadn’t come (my dad brought me, in a 1978 lime green Pontiac Bonneville that overheated so badly on the way home that my stepmother had to come get us in Frostburg, MD, in her pickup truck.  It took us nine hours to get there, when it should have taken three.)

Anyway, the day I moved into my dorm in Foggy Bottom we were lost and hot and frantic with nerves; we lived in a town with no elevator, and were suddenly managing the circus of moving into an 8th floor room in the midst of utter traffic chaos.  Everything was strange, and I just tried to float above it and not do something completely jackass-ish before I knew the lay of the land.  I had a huge assortment of off-brand toiletries that my mother and I had bought at Odd Lots over the summer, an illegal hotpot, a state-of-the-art Brother word processor, and a pair of navy blue Guess! jeans that were about a size too small; I figured I’d get into them soon enough, when I became the healthier, more athletic, non-smoking version of myself I was destined to be in DC.

I said goodbye to my mother hurriedly in the doorway of my dorm room, and shut the door too fast when she started to cry. And then, and then, the happiest year of my life commenced. I went straight to Banana Republic (had never heard of it) and bought mustard colored baggy cords and a brown plaid shirt that I wore to death, along with the oxblood Doc Martens that I appropriated from my roommate, whom I idolized.  It was 1993, and I never did wear those Guess! jeans.

18 Random DC Memories 1993-2011

1.  Everyone back home told me that the city was very dangerous, and I was terrified to be out alone after dark the first few months I was here.  I remember walking home from the library, across the quad, shaking with terror at about 9 p.m.  In retrospect, it’s hilarious, but at the time I had zero frame of reference for what urban danger looked like. I was just trying to survive.

2.  Every Sunday morning, my rommates and I would take the metro from 19th and F to Dupont Circle to eat at Whatsa Bagel.  It takes about an hour on a Sunday morning to walk to Farragut West, wait for the train, get off at Metro Center, wait for a new train, and then ride to Dupont–or about 15 minutes to walk there down 19th St. It took us a while to figure that out. Once, George Stephanopoulos was in front of us in line, and my roommate took his discarded Mystic Water bottle and used it as a vase all year. Ah, the first Clinton administration…good times.

3.  There were smoking rooms in the school library then, and I would root myself there in the afternoons my first fall, loaded up with books and coffee and Camel Lights. I can vividly remember looking out the window at the autumnal treetops silhouetted against the blue sky and feeling so, so lucky.

4.  The U Street metro stop had just opened when I arrived in the city, and we went there (ALL THE WAY OVER THERE) for grilled cheese at ZigZag Cafe. I bounced my first check–also the first check I ever wrote–at nearby Atticus Books.

5. 1994:  We took the bus to the Benihana in the Georgetown Mall for someone’s birthday dinner and the whole experience was so incredibly exotic that I nearly died of delight.

6.  I was in DC for freshman year, then unexpectedly in Ohio, against my will, for sophomore year, and then found out I’d be back in DC for junior year 3 days before classes started. Coming back to DC that August in 1995 was sublime; seeing the back of the Lincoln Monument as my cab crossed the bridge into the city, a weight lifted off my chest, and I took my first deep breath in a year.  I haven’t spent more than five consecutive days in Ohio since.

7. All of the rooftops and intersections I have watched fireworks from on the 4th of July, and all of the illegal displays I’ve seen in my old H St. NE neighborhood and Mt Pleasant.

8.  Seeing people come out early in the morning to harvest the fallen ginkgo fruit on Corcoran St. NW. Less lovely was getting rotten, stinking ginkgo fruit mush all over my shoes later on.  God does it stink.

9.  Drinking my first legal drink at The Brickskeller, then just around the corner from my 22nd and P apartment, at midnight on my 21st birthday. Sadly, they did not card me and there was a feather in my wingding that put me off chicken for years.

(This is getting too long… I’ll do nine more on Friday.)