What's in Dave's Head

Recently Donna and I met up with some friends in Bethany Beach, to celebrate a milestone birthday of a close friend of ours, Monica. Monica introduced Donna and me -- she and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Rockville, and we and her brother John, one of my best friends, were on the Hungerford swim team together. She went to college at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, where she was a classmate of Donna. After college, she moved back home and invited Donna, who was from New Jersey, down for a weekend, and invited me to join them for some of their shenanigans. That was the beginning of Donna's and my romance.  In Bethany Beach, along with Monica and her husband Jim were John and Susan, a couple we hadn't seen in years; Larry and Claire, whom we hadn't met before; June, who like Claire had been a high-school classmate of Monica’s, and her husband Rex; and Monica's dad, John Sr. Monica's cousin Pat, who I had also known since childhood, and his wife ...

Donna and I spent Labor Day weekend in New York City. We met up with Donna’s sister Barb and two of her kids: Michael, who lives in Greenwich Village and works for Morgan Stanley, and Erin, who lives in L.A. but flew out for the long weekend. We also met up with our friends David and Allen. David went to college with Donna, and I shared a brownstone townhouse on Capitol Hill (according to the realtor; in reality it was a dump in Southeast DC, in an ungentrified area nearer to the Navy Yard than the Capitol with hypodermic needles in the street and where the liquor store had 1-1/2-inch thick Plexiglas between you and the cashier with a turntable where you would put your money and spin it to the other side and the cashier would then spin your purchase to you) with him and another person after college. Friday evening along the Hudson Our hotel was in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, by the financial district, an area I haven’t spent much time around. Barb had arr...