Degrees

Greetings from Georgetown.

My brother and I visited my mother here when my mother moved her in the summer of 1981. Our parents divorce that fall. Neither of us recal much of that time, though we both remember playing video games at the local drug store while she worked. Tonight, twenty-five years later, we drove past that same CVS.

Everything comes full circle.

We’re in Washington, D.C., to shoot interviews with Tim Russert and Susan Stamberg for our documantary, “Mister Rogers & Me.” Tim, his wife, Vanity Fair contributing writer Maureen Orth, and son, Luke, spent time with The Rogers in their Nantucket home. I discovered this fact this summer when I read Ms. Orth’s remembrance of Mister Rogers alongside mine in the Nantucket Inquirer-Mirror.

Everything connects.

Ms. Stamberg, often considered “The Founding Mother Of Public Radio,” hosted three live televisions shows with Mister Rogers in the early ’80s, one of which was called “Speaking With Children About Divorce.”

Everything comes full circle.

We just got in from Martin’s Tavern, a Washington, DC, landmark since 1933. Every president from Harry S. Truman to Geaorge W. Bush has dined there (we don’t hold the former against them). We had a few beers and a burger and watched some football. The Chicago Bears (the team we rooted for as kids) were playing The Giants (the team we root for now, assuming, that is, that we followed such things as sports).

Everything is related, and cyclical, and meaningful. And it all comes around to make sense if you can just wait long enough for it to become apparent.

I’ll be waiting…