My Neighborhood

Timeliness be damned, I've been walking a slightly different route to work each day, trying to see new parts of my neighborhood. So far: a power plant, a jungle gym, a swimming pool, the design store "And Beige" (rumored but never before spotted), an entirely cylindrical house, a pottery studio, and a couple of side streets where (fingers crossed) I could dream of living in a little one-bedroom.

Also took a field trip all the way down to Congressional Cemetery, which is the resting place of many prominent gay figures. I didn't find Peter Doyle's headstone (a local tram operator, and Whitman's lover), but I did see the grave of a gay Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovitch ("They gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one") and J. Edgar Hoover. Clyde Tolson, Hoover's associate director of the FBI and "close friend" (ahem) lies only a few yards away. I was down there with my editor, who is working on a book project on Mathew Brady, the famed (and hetero) Civil War photographer and another cemetery resident.

What all of this has to do with writing, I don't know. = ) Except that, while I'm engaged in the not-writing of poetry, I've been writing short (750 word) essays on life in DC. Which has me thinking of the meaning of "home"...and Washington seems to be home a little more with each day.