31st and P

   The better part of three days in Washington, full of work, but also restoration.

   Despite two summers here, and many trips back since then, I had no idea Washington could be like this, especially in August -- sunny, breezy, dry and clear, almost cool in the evening.  It feels like San Diego.

   And I find myself remembering things.  How enjoyable it can be to jog here in the morning.  What a pleasure it is to browse in a really good used bookstore, like Books for America at 22d and N.  How important it is to have a good book in your bag and by your bed, like John Keegan's Fields of Battles (procured at the above for a neat four dollars) and how fine it is, good book at hand, to spend two nights in a hotel and never once turn on the television.  How pleasing it is to get off of M and Wisconsin and wander up and down the residential streets of Georgetown.

   I head up to the grand townhouse at 1415 31st Street, between N and P, where, in the summer of 1982, at the ripe young age of twenty, I lived for a summer with J.A.  It was full of rich, old furnishings, heavy drapes, and fine art.  It was owned by J.A.’s grandmother, the mysterious “Lady Jameison,” who was going to be away for the summer, and who was happy to have J.A. and three of his college friends occupy the place during their summer internships in Washington.  But then her summer travels were curtailed – some problem or other related to her heavy consumption of gin – and she came home.  It was only at this point that she learned J.A.’s friends were not just all preppy young boys like him but also a hick from Vermont, which may have been disappointing but was not disqualifying, but also two Japanese girls, K.C. and Nina, who had to go, and which made Lady J. the first real, live, out-of-the-bunker racist I had ever met. 

   The girls had to scramble to find a place to live.  They find some rooms with a divorced woman who lived around the corner, who was happy to rent the rooms but not to grant any access to her kitchen.  So when we all got home from work I would cook one of the few simple meals that I knew how to make and would travel in one big pot – fettucini al fredo, hamburger and cabbage – and carry it around the corner to eat with the girls at a coffee table, sitting on the floor, in their “apartment.”  Then we’d go out for a walk and get ice cream.  

   Actually, Lady J. was the second racist I encountered that summer.  The first was Julie Bolz.  A preppy girl J.A. brought home along with some other interns he had met at one of the innumerable “receptions” that go on in D.C. in the summertime.  He had told these folks about the friends he was living with during the summer – this was before Lady J. came home – and when I came downstairs and was introduced all around, Julie Bolz, well into her gin and tonic, said, “So where are the slope sisters.” 

   Nice. 

   I was young then, and unfailingly polite.  Which is to say passive.  Before I became middle-aged and edgy.  Before so much of my fuse was gone and I became able – if that is the word - to say to people such things as I now say, from time to time, like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and “You are a fucking asshole, is what you are.”

  Three short years later Julie Bolz ended up in my class at Northwestern Law School, where I was still not yet ready to call her out and just avoided her instead.  As if she wanted anything to do with me. 

   As people like me do, I fantasized from time to time about what I would say, and how I would say it, if I ran into her again.  Which made me wonder what became of her.  Which, now that some nice folks have invented the Internet and Google, takes less about 10 seconds to find out. 

   Julia Bolz is a social justice advocate and co-founder of the Journey with an Afghan School program, a project in partnership with the American Friendship Foundation. A former Seattle attorney, in 1998 she left her law firm to serve as an adviser in developing countries for humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. She has volunteered with dozens of nonprofits across six continents. Since 2002, she has focused on educating girls in Afghanistan, where her team has built and supplied 10 new primary schools and assisted 12 others, serving some 20,000 children. She is also an activist with RESULTS, a grassroots citizen lobby creating the political will to end the worst aspects of poverty.

   Well, how about that.  I bet she doesn’t say “slope sisters” anymore.  Still, I would like to run into her somewhere.  It’s been a long time.  But not too long.