Call Me ... Carmen? Waldo? Swamp Fox?

On being somewhere(s) else, and inviting y'all along

Thirty years ago, I left home on what was pretty much a whim. I’d fallen for a guy, and we both wanted to get out of Augusta, Georgia.

One trip to D.C. was all it took: He had friends there, I fell in love with the city on a weekend trip to meet one of them, and a week later Marc and I had leased an apartment and I’d landed a job.

(Telemarketing for the National Symphony Orchestra, in case you’re curious. It was epically hellish, and it only lasted a week, but it came with free tickets, which is how I saw Alicia de Larrocha from the fourth row.)

That was the spring of 1990. I was 22. And it’s been a long time since I saw either of those numbers. The years that have buried them in memories have involved a few notable lows (about which I’ve written elsewhere) and a whole lot of highs. Not least among the latter was a spell overseas that happened almost as randomly as D.C. did: I’d just started a new job downtown when my boyfriend got posted to Zimbabwe and said “Hey, shall we move to Afr…