Tuesday, March 19, 2002

I am ill, greenish gilled. My neighbor, the retiring President of the Friends of Sierra Leone, is speaking reassuringly to some Afghan refugees she's agreed to put up. It's pouring rain. I'm reminded of my almost-neighbor, a woman named Ottlie English, who I ran into this past August as I was moving in and she was measuring her future place for blinds. She had a low, red convertible and wore a thin scarf around her neck, and she was headed out to some nameless lobbying event; she told me she was in Public Relations. I warned her she had lipstick on her teeth and she thanked me, wiped her teeth, and drove off in her convertible. Then she never returned. Months later, I read in the Washington Post that she and some Northern Alliance soldier had teamed up to run PR for the Alliance in Washington; they'd holed up in some condo in, I believe, McLean. The article in the Post said that Ottlie's condo neighbors had successfully evicted her as a security risk, and Ottlie had a few indignant quotes in the paper; her partner, she said, was "hardly a soldier, just a guy in a suit with a cellphone." I never met whoever took Ottlie's place; whoever they are, they aren't as outgoing. 9:30:26 PM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.