The Georgetown Lighthouse
The first thing one generally notices about the Georgetown Lighthouse, apart from its considerate height, is the absence of a nearby credible waterway. The second thing is that it is composed not of bricks but of books.
The Georgetown Lighthouse sits atop a small but ambitious hill in an otherwise lackluster residential area of northwest DC where Georgetown seeps into Glover Park. Realtors affectionately dub the area Lighthouse Heights, though residents refer to it as either Georgetown or Glover Park. It was designed and built in the caboose of the nineteenth century by one Tuppy Muldoon, an Australian who immigrated to the US to open up his own clipper ship business but failed to do so because the US was already a score beyond the Age of Sail and cozily nestled in the Age of Steam. Muldoon, who had never eaten a fruit or vegetable in his life and even boasted of clobbering a man into three wee men for gesturing at him with a fully grown eggplant ("Malice or no malice, I still got me dignity!"), became mired in a severe strain of scurvy at the age of thirty five and began succumbing to the hallucinations that would hold considerable influence over the final five years of his life. Many a citizen was to be woken up with Muldoon's midnight yelps of "Shiiiiiip! Shiiiiiip!" only to see the vociferous madman pointing not in the direction of the thoroughly distant Potomac River but rather. . . north? Muldoon, on the other hand, was at once perplexed and appalled with his new countrymen's apathy on the matter and decided to take accountability for maritime safety into his own hands. He built his lighthouse inside four years, using the bricks of its original composition, though reports on exactly how Muldoon built his lighthouse vary greatly. Muldoon's journals routinely make reference to his enlisting the help of a forty-man crew, as well as six African elephants, four white tigers, three "elvish types", a pair of languid harpies, a giant squid named Cecil, a wingless albatross, and three gilled but humanoid figures from "up 'round Bal'mer", though an issue of the District Gazette from June of 1896 contains an editorial piece about a "muttonhead Aussie git hollerin' orders at his shoes all day." Friendlier accounts claim of "a garrulous Australian fellow who built a lighthouse with his two hands and using nothing more than his own blood and sweat and tears and fecal matter."
These days the Georgetown Lighthouse is routinely given a flimsy benefit of the doubt since it can technically be seen from the Potomac, though any further speculating is quick to suggest the two have zero camaraderie. Earlier in the century the Lighthouse's popularity was stuck at a perpetual state of wane, and was said to be about one loose brick away from being officially condemned by the US Park Service.
Then came the only credible ally of the Lighthouse since its creator.
"I just took out the bricks and put in the books. One by one by one. It was easy." Mimi Octopus has been living at the Lighthouse off and on since 2012, when she purchased it for an undisclosed sum that consisted wholly of three dollar bills, a legendary transaction now steeped in Georgetown lore.
Miss Octopus is an ideal sixty years old. ("It's the stairs. These things don't have elevators.") Her age is only betrayed by the swathes of grey in her long black hair.
And how many books does it take to make a lighthouse? "I lost count at forty thousand. Virginia Woolf's The Waves. That was number forty thousand. Had it been To the Lighthouse I would have flipped my lid."
When asked about the future of the Georgetown Lighthouse as well as her own future, Miss Octopus, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of puns, abstains from any claims of waiting for her ship to come in and simply says, "This is my corner of the universe."
And when it is no longer her corner?
"The lighthouse goes away and the invisible ships will have to look out for themselves."
And, according to the wishes of Miss Octopus, the DC public library will inherit a joyous dilemma.
