Here are a few more pictures of Washington, D.C. — you’ll notice the befuddling inclusion of a shot of a service station on Wisconsin Avenue. It was that location that clued me into the fact that I was near my old friend Nick’s neighborhood.
He’s a Mary Wash alum, and I met up with him and some other alums a few years after we graduated. It would have been … 1998? 1999? Anyway, I had an air conditioning unit in the trunk of my Ford Taurus, because I’d recently changed apartments myself, and I’d forgotten to take it out. For reasons I’ve never been able to determine, my friends found that uproariously hilarious. People called me “Air Conditioner Guy.” They asked about it in e-mails and calls. (“Is it still in there?”) They brought it up at parties.
To this day, I feel certain there is an element to the joke that I am unaware of.
June 2018. This is the only part of Washington, D.C. that can truly remind me of New York City. (The diverse array of “food trucks” help quite a bit.) The people there, however, seem far more likely to make eye contact and begin a conversation. (I briefly chatted with a nice photographer who took a couple of poetry mini-books home with her.)
I’m proud of that last shot you see of pigeons alighting the park’s namesake — even if it is a little fuzzy and even if I only snapped it by chance. David G. Farragut was a Southerner who nevertheless served heroically as an admiral in the Union navy during the Civil War. He coined the famous phrase, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Maybe I’m only demonstrating my ignorance here, but I didn’t even realize that torpedoes were really a thing during the Civil War, even after seeing the C.S.S. Hunley at Charleston, South Carolina as a kid.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 