All houses are haunted. As a matter of fact, I'd go so far as to say that all dwellings, streets and alleys are haunted--anything that has been or is inhabited has a palpable past, one that lingers in the walls and floorboards, in the closets and cellars we like to call our own. The pavements and cobblestones have seen loves and consummations, tragedies and miracles, illnesses, deaths, wounded spirits and heroic battles, all live within the same walls and spaces we occupy and walk. The past never really goes away, it simply shifts slightly and waits patiently just out of sight. History, a blink removed.
This, I think, is why we're fascinated with old homes, antique furniture, books from yesterday or the day before. This is why we travel to cities with a past; we sense the lives led there, they touch us somehow; they serve to remind us that our time is limited, perhaps not as special as we like to think it is.
I began thinking of this recently when driving through the upper Northwest section of Washington DC. The city, like Rome, has seven hills, and nowhere are these as distinctly marked as along Connecticut Avenue, a straight shot from the rich Maryland suburbs in the north to the White House in the south. The avenue, for a couple of decades, was mine. I knew every store, every restaurant, every crack in the sidewalks on both sides; I knew all the animals at the National Zoo, the movie schedules at the Uptown and the menu at the Roma where Frank Abbo, a noted hunter, decorated his restaurant with the stuffed trophies from his safaris. I had my first illegal beer at the Roma when it was the only restaurant open after a snowstorm and the waitresses were too harried to check a kid's ID.
This, I think, is why we're fascinated with old homes, antique furniture, books from yesterday or the day before. This is why we travel to cities with a past; we sense the lives led there, they touch us somehow; they serve to remind us that our time is limited, perhaps not as special as we like to think it is.
I began thinking of this recently when driving through the upper Northwest section of Washington DC. The city, like Rome, has seven hills, and nowhere are these as distinctly marked as along Connecticut Avenue, a straight shot from the rich Maryland suburbs in the north to the White House in the south. The avenue, for a couple of decades, was mine. I knew every store, every restaurant, every crack in the sidewalks on both sides; I knew all the animals at the National Zoo, the movie schedules at the Uptown and the menu at the Roma where Frank Abbo, a noted hunter, decorated his restaurant with the stuffed trophies from his safaris. I had my first illegal beer at the Roma when it was the only restaurant open after a snowstorm and the waitresses were too harried to check a kid's ID.
I knew Dupont Circle before the gays took over the neighborhood, back when Sophocles Pappas had a guitar store on the second floor above a cheesy nightclub. It was the only store that sold Fender electrics, Strats and Teles, and even if I couldn't afford one, I was there three days a week inspecting the merchandise and playing as much as allowed.
I was downtown when the riots broke out in 1968 after Martin Luther King's assassination, and downtown again a scant 18 months after that for the Peace Moratorium that brought 250,000 anti-war protesters into the streets. I helped cover some of the demonstrations for the Washington Post and was almost killed by a DC cop who shoved his revolver into my mouth. Two years later, still working for that paper, I had the good fortune to see Watergate unfold and befriend some of the reporters who made the story happen and changed America--at least for a little while.
When I had a job with insane hours, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., I rode my motorcycle in the dead of winter nights on a deserted Rock Creek Parkway, once was handcuffed and briefly jailed for operating the very same motorcycle without a license. I've owned homes in the city, leased apartments and basements, slept on floors and on one or two occasions, outside. Every block has ghosts with names. There's something vaguely disconcerting and ultimately pleasing about this. On the eve of Halloween, I can say that the hauntings are good.
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