I was driving the Green Bomber, my first car, passed on to me by my parents. Despite the fact the green Plymouth Satellite was wide and long, I could get it into almost any parking space thanks to the power steering. My parents had had a much smaller Valiant that was nearly impossible to park due to its lack of assisted steering. That car was totaled before its time when I drove it from Cabin John to Rosslyn the first day of my first job. Well, I didn’t quite make it to Rosslyn. The lane I was in was stopped just before the Key Bridge at the foot of Georgetown. Traffic began to move; I looked over my shoulder to see if I could change lanes, accelerated to 10 miles per hour and crashed – well, bumped-- into the car ahead of me. Traffic had stopped.
A 1974 Plymouth Satellite much like the one I had.
It is uniquely embarrassing to total your schoolteacher parents’ car, forcing them to make the unexpected purchase of a new one. And with three older brothers it’s a long while before you hear the end of it.
This day I was driving the GB in the Spring Valley neighborhood behind my alma mater, American University with my roommate, Patty. We were coasting past mansions of all sizes. On the smaller side were the tall, narrow homes that fit on lesser lots, and then had their facades dressed up as elegantly as possible.
We’d been to the famous Wagshal’s delicatessen on Massachusetts Avenue where we had bought beautiful sandwiches for dinner later.
I came to a stop facing a three-story house the color of tepid tea, sitting on a small lot with the front door right at the curb. This house looked like it felt sorry for itself having only a modicum of iron tracery around its windows for decoration
Okay, this isn't the ugly house I saw, but it looks like it's crying
out for revenge from its builder.
“Wow,” I said. “That is the ugliest house I’ve ever seen.”
I heard a loud sniff and turned to Patty.
“That’s the last house my father designed before he died,” she whimpered.
Whaaaaaaaaa?? Her father had been a commercial architect. He’d been dead for years. “Your father designed office buildings. You never said he designed houses.”
“Well,” she gulped, trying to get a hold of herself. “He did one from time to time and this was the last one.”
Oh. Of all the houses in Washington, I had to stop here.
Was this not the most random and painful type of gaffe possible? I’ve put my foot in my mouth a thousand times when I should have known better. One time I started to tell an Alzheimer's joke to a woman whose brother suffered from the disease, but caught myself in time, making a lame excuse about why I couldn't remember the joke. Alzheimer's, perhaps?
In this case. I knew absolutely nothing about Patty’s father’s expeditions into designing for the housing market. I only knew that he’d designed a few poky, square box buildings in downtown D.C. They certainly came well below the restrictions set in 1899 at 130 feet. A few areas along Pennsylvania Avenue were allowed to rise to 160 feet.
What to do?
“Geez, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know, how could I have known?”
“Can we just go home, please,” Patty said glumly.
“Uh sure.”
I turned the Green Bomber away from the sad house and up to Foxhall Road., headed to Virginia
It was a quiet ride with my usually chatty roommate lost in her thoughts.
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