DC By the Book

Excerpt: I had arrived in Washington to give a paper, for which I had only moderate affection, at a conference.... I decided to attend out of no great affinity for the organization or its members or its mission, but because my mother and sister still lived in D.C. and it had been three years since my last visit.... The conference was at the Mayflower Hotel, but as I disliked meetings and had little interest in the participants of such affairs, I took a room at a little B&B off Dupont Circle called the Tabbard Inn. The most attractive feature of the place to me was the absence of a phone in the room.

Excerpt: I had walked as far as New York Avenue and decided to hail a taxi. Three or four empty ones passed me an I thought of the old joke: What do you call two black men trying to get a cab in Washington, D.C.? Pedestrians. I raised my arm again and this time a car stopped, no doubt because the Ethiopian driver had a male companion with him and he felt safe enough. They looked back at me after I gave them my address, one of saying, "Are you Ethiopian?" and the other, "You look Ethiopian," I said, "No, I'm just Washingtonian." I closed my eyes and drifted.

Excerpt: I drove back to D.C., back to what had been my mothers home, what had been my parents' home. The inside of the house was stale and hot. I switched on the large air-conditioning unit in the dining room and sat at the table. I sat where I had always sat during meals and regarded the other chairs. other and Father had sat at the prominent ends and I was placed on a side alone facing my brother and sister, an empty chair beside me. The occasional guest would occupy that seat, but otherwise it was always there, empty, never removed to be against the wall like the other auxiliary chairs. I listened to the house, recalling my parents' voices and footfalls, but I couldn't hear them.

Excerpt: I was just tall enough to dunk the basketball, but not quite big enough to get close enough to the basket in a half-court game to do so. I enjoyed the exercise and the game, but not so much playing the game. I wasn't very good at it. I would catch the ball, look to make a reasonably sage pass while dribbling, then make that reasonably safe pass and move to another spot on the perimeter. One day, a sunny May Saturday, I was playing on a court near by house. I was seventeen and feeling more awkward than I ever had or would feel again. I had been playing for about thirty minutes, making safe pass after safe pass when I found myself considering the racist comments of Hegel concerning Oriental peoples and their attitude toward freedom of the self when I was bumped into the lane and so appeared to be cutting to the basket and the ball was thrown back to me. I threw up a wild an desperate shot which had no prayer of going in; it was ugly. A member of my team asked me what I was thinking about and I said, "Hegel.".... I watched the expression on his face and perhaps reflected the same degree of amazement. "I was thinking about his theory of history." -- "You'd better Hegel on home."

Excerpt: Bill and I were over at Eastern Market, wandering through the aisles of produce and fish. Bill was a teenager and I was pretending to be one Father had charged us with finding a nice late-season bluefish. School was about to begin for us and we were enjoying the last days of summer break. Bill was talking with a friend of his who worked at a crab stand while I looked over the fish. Two letter-jacketed boys from Bill's school swaggered down the aisle toward us, making their kind of animal noises to announce their presence.