Read his story: Every community that doesn’t have a Mark Opsasnick needs to get one. He is a tall and obsessed man from Greenbelt who quietly rages against forgetting. What he rescues from collective amnesia are not the big things. One of his favorite phrases is: “miscellaneous and unknown.”
He’s the guy to ask about, say, Patsy Cline’s seminal gigs at the Dixie Pig in Prince George’s County. Or James M. Cain hard-boiling his last novels in a house near College Park. Or the true story of the local “haunted boy” who inspired “The Exorcist.”
This morning Opsasnick is driving down a winding street in Alexandria. Anybody else would have seen just the tall oaks and blooming crape myrtles shading neat Tudors and Colonials. Opsasnick looks more deeply and sees something that isn’t here anymore.
“We’re entering Morrison country,” he says dramatically, like a tour guide to a secret landscape. “These are the streets he walked on, these are the fields he played on, the sidewalks he traveled to visit his friends.”
That would be Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors.
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