Moving and the intimacy of memory
Moving and the intimacy of memory
I knew, but did not understand, that when we moved, we would be less than two blocks from the first place we lived in Washington, DC.
I was two years out of law school, and it was our first time living together for more than a few weeks. Because I had had a job in Philadelphia, and he’d had one in Boston, we did the long distance thing for a couple of years, until he convinced me to move to Washington.
I was trepidatious about living in a one-company town (it is, but it isn’t), but I agreed. I was accepted into an Honors Attorney program at the US Treasury. My office was on the first floor of the building on the back of the $10 bill. I went from Big Law—wading through mind-numbing document productions in lawsuits I hoped our clients would lose—to being thrust into a very small General Counsel’s office where serious things were happening with vast policy implications: the at-that-time-unheard-of debt limit; legal questions concerning bank safety and enforcement, and the full faith and credit of the United States. It felt like being paid to go to grad school, an immersion into public finance and the US banking system, with a steep learning curve.
We lived on the top floor of an eight story building called the Shawmut, just this side of seedy, which had a live-in super named Larry who was never not drunk, and elevators that were often hors de combat.
It was a tough slog upstairs for us in Washington’s tropical heat, but it was impossible for the old ladies in the building, whom my partner and a neighbor frequently carried upstairs. (We broke down and bought a room unit air conditioner shortly after our place became an inferno, around May.)
Across the street was a 7-Eleven frequented by cops who knew where to get free coffee at any time of day or night.
I could walk to work, and usually did, but I could also take the 42 bus, which continues to run down Columbia Road.
In my strolls around the new neighborhood, which is to say the old neighborhood, I find myself in a storm of memory. The kids on their way to the elementary school down the street were a source of delight every morning, abstractly. The idea that we might someday be parents who would bring our own children to school was inconceivable.
The cheap grocery store a block away, an IGA, is now the more upscale Streets Market; the battered Safeway is still the battered Safeway. I am shopping there once again.
The unfamiliar familiarity, the where-did-those-decades-go and how-did-I-land-here, again?
Marriage, children born and raised and fledged, my parents gone, beloved elders dying one-by-one, friends lost too soon, new relationships forged, earlier ones grown more beloved—serendipitous intersecting orbits.
Is anything more intimate than shared memories, or more precious, or more ephemeral?
Looking across the table at my husband, it astonishes me that we’ve known each other so long—have grown up together, built a family together, traveled across the globe, suffered losses and, more often, joy, throughout these years.
I’m tearful with the wonder of it all and the longing that’s an inescapable aspect of being human.
The mystery and intimacy of memory.
With love,
Martha
P.S. ICYMI, here is last week’s newsletter, Captain Cook and other things.
P.P.S. I’m tickled that my publisher made it onto the front page of Publishers Weekly, and Three Muses made it onto the back!
❤️ from one long married (39 years this June) to another— Yours is a wonderful reflection on a life well lived!
I've lived in the exact same area since 1990! The "Sev" is right up the street. We're on Wyoming. I pass the Shawmet every day while walking my dog. Where are you? Saw your P&P talk a few months ago. Lovely writer!