Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire
In 1960, our family came back to the United States from Lebanon. We settled down, for a while, in Downtown Washington, D.C. We were in a strange part of the city where the desperate slums met high society. A phenomenon that is common enough in many large cities, like Boston, or New York, or Washington.
We lived for awhile in the great Mayflower Hotel, in a suite, with a kitchenette. The suite had a number of rooms, and ornate furniture and desks, with leather trim. There was a concierge at the hotel -- a lot like the concierge in the movie, Pretty Woman, who takes an interest in helping Julia Roberts learn to be high society.
When our dad took Suzy and me downstairs, and asked where the nearest school was -- it was winter -- the concierge clearly tried to dissuade Dad of sending us out into the nearby community. Basically, the nearest schools were in the heart of the D.C. slums. Yet, I had already gone to over half a dozen different schools already in my life, and this was no different. So off we went.
My school had large staircases, and what seemed like thousands and thousands of students. In that whole school, only one other student -- a boy -- was also identifiably "white." (Suzy went to another school.) The food in my school cafeteria was terrible. It was hard to believe it was really"food." It seemed to be a mashup of leftovers. Nobody ate it. Fortunately, as an alternative to a real meal, there were candy machines at the school -- which, to me, seemed amazing. For 5 cents I could buy a Pay Day peanut candy bar for lunch. Which is what I did. Day after day.
The Mayflower Hotel was fancy. Dignitaries who were staying in the hotel lounged around downstairs in a kind of reading room, poring over the Washington Post and New York Times, and smoking cigars and cigarettes.
The Mayflower suite we were in had huge, gilt-framed mirrors in the living room. In those days, it seemed that our parents frequently went out for evening social events, even though they had just arrived. After the small children went to bed I would turn on that exotic, new device -- a black and white television set -- and watch, by myself, forbidden shows like "The Outer Limits." Which, with no built up immunity from watching television, scared me to death. Especially the time the show was about ghosts, billowing out of huge gilt-framed mirrors. Exactly like the many expensive mirrors that the Mayflower had thoughtfully installed on many walls in the suite surrounding me.
Christmas was coming in Washington, D.C. in 1960. And Mom sent Dad and me out into the night streets to drum up whatever we could of holiday cheer.
The Mayflower Hotel is on Connecticut Avenue. We walked northwest of the hotel, several blocks, to Dupont Circle. I remember it was windy and cold, and maybe even raining. Out at the intersections of the streets, people were standing in the cold. They were tending blazing, charcoal-filled braziers, right on the streets. They were roasting chestnuts. You could buy a little brown paper bag full of hot chestnuts (and they were really very very hot.) Dad bought some, and we burned our mouths, trying to eat them as we were standing there at the stoplights.
Dad said that when he was young, the chestnut trees of America had begun to die off from a terrible fungus. He said these chestnuts we were eating were not American chestnuts, but Chinese chestnuts. The chestnut tree had once blanketed America, with huge trees everywhere -- one in four trees was a chestnut in many parts of the country. By the time Dad had grown up, the chestnuts were almost all dead. And, in our childhoods, Dad would occasionally drive by some shriveling young trees -- American chestnuts -- that were helplessly trying to survive, but that were in the process of dying from the chestnut blight. He said the Chinese chestnuts we had bought tasted quite a bit like American chestnuts.
At Dupont Circle there were news stands, which sold tobacco, magazines, tabloids and newspapers, and gum. One of them also had a small tabletop Christmas tree for sale. Which Dad bought, and triumphantly carried back down the boulevard to the waiting family at the Mayflower Hotel.
Somewhere along the line, he also found a big bag of mixed shelled nuts.
Basically, our Christmas in Washington D.C. was a very urban Christmas. But, urchins that we all were, we hardly fit into the highlife of the Mayflower Hotel. We discovered we could crack the shells of the Christmas nuts by putting them into the windowsill of a small wooden window sash in the little kitchen in the suite. We'd bang the window down on the nuts, again and again, cracking them open, and denting the wood of the window sash.
Not much later, Dad had found a house in a place called Wheaton, on a street called "Elby" Street -- easy to remember because it sounded a lot like the Italian Island of Elba, in Italy. He had bought the house through a kind of huckster salesman, who had his sales office up at the movie theater complex on the main highway. Dad took me to see the Elby Street house right after he bought it that winter, and before we moved in. When we arrived, he couldn't find it, because all the streets looked so similar, and the houses so half-built, and there was no landscaping to speak of. So we had to go find the salesman, at the movie theater, and he showed us where it was.
And then, our lives became suburban.
--Linda Wysong Weld
