My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from her phone to her brain to her face to my brain to my face, back at her, and so on, that we were both a little more self-contained and impervious to the pain that flies at you from nowhere. For several years now, I have been reading Marcus Aurelius to help me be more of a Stoic and, if not entirely above pain, at least a little more capable of carrying on in spite of it.
Then Cynthia said one of the words that pass straight through my defenses, the name of our daughter, who had left a minute ago. Cynthia ran down the stairs, looking at her phone, uttering another expletive, and, with me following her into the living room, finally revealing what was going on.
There had been a shooting at Simpson Field, which is five or six blocks from our daughter’s middle school. Details came out in a jumble. “Steve Scalise, he’s somebody,” Cynthia said. “Majority whip,” I said. I have been receiving his email blasts for years. Scalise and the others were playing baseball. Who plays baseball this early on a weekday? I wondered.
Our daughter texted. She was fine. Her school was on lockdown.
Like anyone absorbing news of a calamity, I was going through the usual stages of shock and concern. But I was feeling anxious about what came next, the necessary but almost inhuman forgetting that allows you to change the subject and go about your business.
On my ride to work, I biked past the crime scene, festooned with yellow tape. At work I passed a big television and realized it was something else to see a place you know so well on TV, crammed with police and emergency vehicles. Why yes, there’s my favorite overpriced coffee shop and the CVS where I buy medicine for that foot thing I don’t want to talk about.
And there was Simpson Field, previously known to me as a place to watch Little League games. The aluminum stands are hot and uncomfortable and you’ll get a sunburn if you’re not careful. No one ever gets thrown out stealing second and the inning comes to an automatic end after five runs are scored.
I moved to Alexandria from Capitol Hill 18 years ago and stayed, never that eager to live anywhere else.
We came first to the Del Ray neighborhood, where my friend Barry was waiting tables at the Evening Star Café, which had just opened on Mount Vernon Avenue. The menu was reasonably priced, with a pork chop and mashed potatoes for ten or eleven bucks, one of the few restaurant meals I could afford at the time. The neighborhood was shifty, but Cynthia, then my fiancée, really liked it. As we plotted a course toward marriage, she rented an apartment across the street from the tennis courts at Simpson Field.
Cynthia took up tennis. I didn’t, but would sometimes hit balls to her, so she could work on her backhand. I practiced basketball there, hoping to revive my long-neglected jump shot for The Weekly Standard staffers’ regular game.
We bought a tiny gingerbread house across Route 1, close enough to Simpson to see the blur of the lights above the field at night. Many times from my kitchen I could hear the sound of the announcer calling out the name of the batter-up. I joined the YMCA next door, then quit, then joined again, then quit again, finally figuring out that I liked regular exercise but that it had to be outdoors with no mirrors around.
Del Ray was where we hung out. Our rehearsal dinner took place upstairs at the Evening Star Café, where the owner Stephanie graciously broke up an escalating argument between two of my male relatives who seemed dangerously close to trading blows. I remember having drinks there, at a sidewalk table, with Barry the week after 9/11.
Not long ago I realized that in less than a year, Alexandria will have been my home longer than any other place I have lived. And it is the only home my children have known—my children, among whose blessings is that they have brought us close to so many families, neighbors, people I now just call friends. This is the part about being a Stoic that I find impossible: not being so attached to the people and places I love.
