I plan to arrive Thursday evening at my hotel, rent a car Friday morning, and head for Annandale just to see what it looks like. I haven’t been there since my family left three days after graduation in 1968. I have to go see our old neighborhood and house. I’m tempted to drive out Braddock Road to see what George Mason University looks like now. Between my junior and senior years I attended a couple of poli-sci classes for credit out there when it was four buildings around an under-construction quadrangle. It’s some different now. I rode down that narrow two-lane road to Fairfax every day on my 50cc Aermacchi motorbike. I might want to drive down St. Michael’s Lane to see St. Michael‘s, where I slept through many a Sunday sermon thanks to my Washington Star deliveries earlier that morning. I should stop to mourn 3 Chefs, where we went after Mass on Sundays for pancakes maybe once a month.

Then it’s off to the church where many a dance was held back in the 1960s, or so I’m told. I never attended one. I was a nerd back then, but I was a nerd with an afternoon paper route consisting of 45 customers in single-family homes for my first three years of high school and a janitor’s job three days a week my last year there. My social life was impaired by those obligations, as well as the fact we had only one car in the family and I wasn’t old enough for a driver’s license until November of 1966 anyway.

The following day is more auto exploration until it’s time for the tour of the school and then a pre-football game dinner and gathering afterward. Sunday I hop a plane back to LA.