Translated Geographies
Looking over my referers log I see someone looked up the
post I wrote on Derrick Hsu. This reminded me that I need to add a
minor caveat to that story. My friend [Nancy] Micaela is fairly sure
that Derrick didn't go to high school at Georgetown Day School but at
some place called the Field School. I do not know this Field School,
but she was more sure of this than I was of what I thought I knew, and
she knew Derrick fairly well too. So I'm going with her version. Nancy
attended Walter Johnson High in Bethesda.
The entire time I was with this group of people in college, who
had all grown up in the DC suburbs I found I could never understand
their experiences and stories of pre-college life directly, but had to
translate the spaces and geometries into Boston places and vectors
before I really got a dense emotional sense of what they were trying to
relate. I always had the feeling that when I couldn't come up with an
anologue I wasn't really getting it. Even now I don't judge I was. Fort
Reno, Great Falls. Cordell ave., the Psychodeli, Madames
Organ, WHFS. WGTB (or whatever that Georgetown U. stations call
letters were) Maybe you had to be there. I can't begin to imagine what
Tran, who went to high school in Saigon, makes of the
descriptions and accounts I give of enthusiasms and places here. She
doesn't try to reciprocate, perhaps feeling there is no way I could
understand, but I wish she would anyway.
Some people who read this, may have noted that previously, I tend
to refer to Micaela when I do in folds of near total obliqueness. For
the 20 years we have known each other we have not always seen eye to
eye about...things. She was in town over on the Fourth last month down
from Brooklyn visiting her father with her husband Andreas and her two
sons Julien and Pascal (5 yrs and 18 mo). So we we met up and wandered
through the Smithsonian folklife festival caught up on things, ate
food, and stuff.
11:52:21 PM  ;;
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