Junk Mail

Digging through the pile of paper and detritus that is my desk, I came upon this envelope I brought back from Washington just for blogging purposes. (When was I in Washington? Oh, waaay back in December. I've just been waiting for the perfect occasion.)

When I went to Washington in December for the foreign service test, I stayed with my old friend Cliff. By "old" I refer to both his age and the amount of time I've known him. He's lived in his cool old northwest Washington row house for 50 years, and is an incredible source of Washington history. He used to watch President Truman take walks on his lunch hour. The empty lot next to his house was seized by the State Department during the Iranian hostage crisis back in, what, 1979? He's seen a lot, and I always enjoy spending my time in Washington with him.

After their kids grew up and moved out, Cliff and his wife started renting rooms in their home to students, interns and, mostly, scientists who were in town for four or six months. I first lived with him in 1990, shortly after graduating from college when I spent five months in a Capitol Hill internship. (I met him through a friend of a friend of my father, when Dad was spending plenty of his time in Washington as president of a trade association.) I lived with him again a decade later, when I moved from Guam back to the mainland and worked at a different DC trade association.

Imagine my surprise when I saw Cliff at dinner and he handed me an envelope.

"You got some mail today," he said.

I thought that Shelly had been really proactive and had sent me a good luck note or something, so the reality was quite a let down.


"You still get mail here all the time," Cliff said. "If it looks important, I forward it. But most of it, I just throw away."

I get mail there all the time. I haven't lived there in more than five years, which makes me wonder how much junk mail is showing up at our house in Maryland right now, where I have lived within in the past 20 months.

To make matters worse, Discover knows where I am. Now if I could only persuade them to send my bill to Washington, where Cliff could throw it away.