Washington, A Curious Place

Washington, DC. Such a curious place. Taxation without representation, a city of contrasts between the rich and the poor, center of political life in America, and media capital of the world.

The 67-square-mile District of Columbia is divided into four quadrants: Northwest, Southwest, Northeast and Southeast. The US Capitol building marks the center where the quadrants meet. Numbered streets run north and south. Lettered streets run east and west. There are no J, X, Y, or Z streets. Avenues named for US states run diagonally, often meeting at traffic circles and squares.

For me, Washington provokes a lot of nostalgia. I lived there for 11 years, the longest I have lived in any place during my adult lifetime. Ten of those years were spent at Georgetown University, and the final year was my internship at Bethesda. When I arrived, I was 18. I left when I was 29, and I vowed that I would never live there again. I wanted to seal off the intensity of everything that was my twenties.

My sophomore year at Georgetown, I was a bus driver for the university transportation service. We had really cool Mercedes buses with a tighter turning radius than a VW beetle. Shortly after I started this job, much better than working in the cafeteria as a freshman, I drove my bus through Sheridan Circle and came upon the assassination of Orlando Letelier. I was there moments after the explosion, before the police arrived. It was the first car bombing I witnessed.

By my junior year I was working for the university president. I took Walter Cronkite to the airport after we gave him an honorary degree. He asked me what I was studying, and I told him Latin and Greek. He baited me by asking why Latin would be useful today, and I told him that it was the ancient language of lawyers and warriors. He thought that was cute. Then he went on to express a negative opinion of President Ford. I also met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and I was struck by how beautiful she was in person.

A couple of weeks before I graduated from Georgetown the first time, the university president, a Jesuit priest, took me to dinner at a trendy French restaurant on K Street to discuss my future plans. I was so oblivious to the future at 22 that I had not even considered what I would do when I graduated. As we waited for our table, the president had a conversation in French with the maitre d’. I spoke Latin, not French, so all I caught was John Thompson and basketball. It was the first time I had lobster, I was such a kid from the provinces in those days. Over the course of the meal it was determined that I would go to medical school, vice law school, which was the usual course of students who worked in the president's office. I introduced the medical school option, because I thought if I became a lawyer, I would become a bad person. I was very successful in the president's office, a cut-throat place where only results mattered. The president was moving to embrace Bill Clinton, who was beginning his ascent in Arkansas. Later, the president wrote the first draft of Clinton's first inaugural address. We all know how that turned out.

That's how I ended up a doctor, not an attorney. Lots of memories here. And I kept good to my pledge. I have not lived in Washington since 1986. Maybe I achieved my goal of not being a bad person.