Blogging A-Z: D Is for D.C.

     Jack and I met in Washington, D.C. I was living in a communal house, what later came to be called a commune but we called a co-op, having dropped out of Antioch College as the quintessential dropout, a second-year humanities student. Jack had left home in Wichita after his father died, to fight for civil rights and revolution, against racism and war, and came to Washington because a high school classmate was a student at George Washington University.
  Jack moved into a rooming house and got a job as a waiter at a lunch place on Capitol Hill. He hung around the university on his free time, and one day, while looking at the apartment listings in the student union, someone told him about this house up near Dupont Circle. He met the resident manager of our building, a grad student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and moved in.
    No one knew the person who had recommended us to Jack, which made some of our more paranoid residents suspicious. "He must be an FBI agent," said W. Why? He's from Kansas. He has blond hair. But he had a job and could pay one-sixth of the rent for our house, and we'd all moved in thinking we'd be one of six, and there'd been only five of us for a few months.
        I wasn't interested in Jack at first. The man I wanted was our resident manager, but he wasn't interested in me. Besides, Jack was cynical and caustic, with a judgment about everyone and everything. 

------------------------------------------

April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

SOLSC 31: Moving, Part 2

            I've lived in my current apartment for more than 46 years, and I sincerely hope to stay here for the rest of my life. But in the 10 years between leaving home and settling in on Riverside Drive, in New York City, I lived at

• Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio (Sept. 1960-March 1961)

• a shared apartment on West 87th Street, between Columbus & Central Park West, in Manhattan (April-June 1961) (Antioch College had a co-op work-study curriculum, in which we studied on campus for half the year and worked at jobs anywhere in the U.S. the other half)

• back to Yellow Springs (July-Sept. 1961)

• a very brief stay in Los Angeles (a couple of weeks; too long a story for this slice)

• so a few months at home in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania (Oct.-Dec.1961)

• back to Yellow Springs (Jan.-March 1962)

• living at NIH (it was a co-op job; I wasn't a patient) (April-June. 1962)

• Irving Place, N.W., in Washington, D.C. (July-Aug. 1962) (I used to remember this address)

• 1612 19th Street, N.W. (Sept.1962-Aug.1963) (here's when I dropped out of Antioch the first time)

• 1835 19th Street, N.W. (a couple of weeks)

• 1833 19th Street, N.W. (Sept. 1963-March 1964)

• back to Yellow Springs (April-Sept. 1964) (here's when I went back to college)

• 70 West 82nd Street (Oct.1965-Dec. 1965) (here's when I got married, and dropped out of Antioch the second time)

• 134 West 82nd Street (Jan.1966-Sept. 1967) (here's when I started back to college, at City College, at night...)

• 101 West 85th Street (Sept.1967-Nov. 1970) (and here’s when I went to City College full-time; rent here was almost half what it was at the previous place)

            After I graduated from City College and got a real job, I started agitating for a real apartment. The kitchen on 85th Street had no counter space, and its sink was half the size of a normal one and just attached to a pipe under the window, with a piece of wood nailed to the wall for the drainboard.

            When we found the apartment on Riverside Drive, it seemed huge. Two good-sized bedrooms. A kitchen with counters and still big enough for a dining table.

           And a childhood dream come true. When we lived in West Haven, we would drive into New York a few times a year to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn. Riding down the West Side Highway, I saw these impressive apartment buildings towering above the hillsides of Riverside Park and thought, I want to live there some day. This apartment was in one of those buildings. It missed the river view, but otherwise... I feel happy every time I leave my building: the park, when I look left, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine when I look right. No other street in New York has this view.

SOLSC 30: Moving, Part 1

            I got this idea for a slice from Girl Griot, who wrote about all the places she’d lived since leaving home. Since I’ve moved a lot since I was born, I’ll do this in two parts, before I left home, and after.

            My first eight months were spent in Newport News, Virginia. My father had been hired at Langley Field by the National American Committee on Aeronautics (what later became NASA and was featured in the movie, and book, Hidden Figures) as an engineer right out of college in 1939. By 1943, he was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland. My brother was born while we lived in war housing until World War II was over. In the summer of 1945 we move to Silver Spring, Maryland, while my father works at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins, until he’s fired as a security risk a year later. After my sister is born in Washington, D.C., we move into that city to live with my father’s parents.

            In the spring of 1947, we move up to Brooklyn to live with my mother’s parents, on Avenue P. (Yes, Avenue P, just like the song on the Really Rosie album, lyrics by Maurice Sendak, music by Carole King.) My father is still unable to get a job in his field because of McCarthyism. A month after I start school in 1947, we move, along with my grandparents, to another apartment in Brooklyn, in Bensonhoist, excuse me, Bensonhurst (my mother constantly corrected any trace of Brooklyn accent creeping into my childish speech).

            Leases in New York always ran out in October (why? did landlords not have any children? did they not realize how hard it is for kids to change schools a month after school starts?). In October 1950, my nuclear family moved out of the city, leaving my grandparents in another apartment in Brooklyn. My father always said he hated cities, so he moved us to the country in West Haven, Connecticut.

            The longest I lived anywhere growing up was in West Haven, five and a half years. In the spring of 1956, my father got a job at a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia, and in May, six weeks before I would have graduated from eighth grade into high school, we moved again, to Levittown, Pennsylvania. (I did manage to persuade my parents to let me take the train, alone, back to West Haven so I could attend my class’s graduation.)

            And at the end of my junior year in high school, my parents were perverse once again and moved me around the Philly suburbs, from north to west, to Gladwyne, forcing me to change schools once again at an awkward moment.

To be continued.