The Last Word On Nothing

When I was in 8th grade – I think it was 8th grade – we had to do some public speaking. One of our speeches had to be an explanation of something, and I chose to explain the layout of the streets of Washington, D.C.

Today, I can’t imagine how I went on for multiple minutes about this, even figuring in the time to mess with the opaque projector. It is a neat layout – there are four quadrants, centered on the U.S. Capitol, so you can find the intersection of 7th and E Streets, say, at four different locations in the city. Numbers run north-south, letters and words run east-west, states cut diagonally across the grid.

I’ve always loved maps. I found all of this beautifully logical and fascinating enough to explain to my classmates.

I was thinking about that speech recently because I’ve been redrawing my own mental map of D.C. I’ve lived around here for most of my life. And for most of that time, I’ve gotten around the city on public transportation. So my mental map of my hometown grew as blobs around Metro stations—blobs that spread and ran into each other, sometimes in ways that surprised me. I added layers onto the maps as buildings were built and demolished, businesses opened and closed again. Jobs added details and depth to particular neighborhoods.

But now I find myself driving around the city. My mom stopped driving years ago. When my dad died in November, my mom gave me the car. I spent the next seven months driving back and forth to her house in the suburbs. At the same time that I was shifting my travels from the sidewalk to the roadway, I was shifting my life from my own apartment close to the Maryland border to my partner’s house, a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building.

All that driving brings new connections to my map. One evening this spring I was driving through the boring part of town, northwest of the White House. A plain grid, all the buildings the same height, shiny metal and glass. The street looked just like all the others around there. But as I waited at a red light, I realized I was a block and a half west of the job I’d had from 2007 to 2008. I’d stood at that corner countless times on the way to lunch. That Malaysian place was half a block to the left. And that strip club.

Over and over as I’ve driven around the city, I’ve had that feeling – realizing that I’m in a place that I know very well, but from another angle. I navigate the tangle of parkways and ramps behind the Lincoln Memorial. I drive the little spur of highway that passes in front of the Kennedy Center, and the underpass behind it.

Is this interesting? It seemed interesting when I started writing it, in June. But then the next day my mom died, and my sense of everything has been askew ever since. I wrote those two sentences, the beginning of this paragraph, when I revised this in August. Now, it’s the end of September, and I’m reading it all again.

A few weeks before my mom died, when she was doing great (around her one-year anniversary on hospice), I started adding yet another layer to my mental map. My partner and I adopted a dog. Now I walk around my new neighborhood with Eliot, my furry little buddy, staring at the ground, like he does, and noticing all the dogs, like he does.

We walk the same four sides of the rectangular block over and over and over. Over and over. I know where the dogs pee, because Eliot has to stop for a good, long sniff session. I have my own sniff sessions with the front yards with rosemary and basil bushes, and I notice the fig trees. There’s a giant stump that makes me think of a flat-topped mountain; I imagine tiny villages and sheep on its flanks. Sometimes Eliot poops by it.

Some of the items on my maps are transient. Buildings in the city rise and fall; restaurants open and close. Last week dessert-plate-sized mushrooms popped out of the grass near the Washington Monument. On our walks, too; for a few days, I kept an eye out for a dead bird on the sidewalk. I once discovered a discarded sausage – well, Eliot did. It was gone by the next day. A week ago a Common Yellowthroat stopped in the side yard of a rowhouse, headed south on its fall migration.

The map grows and gets more detailed and shifts.

After losing my parents, I feel like my brain is remodeling itself. In the same way I keep remapping the city, I’m remapping my life without its anchors. “Cheerleaders and backstops gone,” my mom’s youngest sister texted the other day. She lost her own decades ago, of course. “Suddenly there is nobody left standing between you and the world, to take the first blows on their shoulders,” went a poem that an acquaintance sent me over the weekend. Hers are gone, too.

Today when I was out with the dog for his noon walk, in the rain, a man stopped me and asked for help finding his hotel. I explained that he was in the wrong quadrant of the city and yes, there are several 6th & K streets. I said the one he was looking for was far away – although, on later reflection, he’d already been walking for a long time (from the wrong 6th & K toward a different wrong 6th & K) without an umbrella and was drenched, and maybe he wouldn’t have minded another 40 minutes of walking. I pointed him toward the nearest Metro station and wished him luck. The best part – this conversation was mostly in French. (My French is terrible, but I know the words for north, south, east, and west, and struggled my way through sentences like “vous avez la carte de metro?”)

My parents would have loved that.

“Because whenever you do anything, you think first about what they would think, right?” an acquaintance said to me this summer.

Indeed.

Is this interesting? I think so. But does it matter, if my mom isn’t going to read it?

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously