A Walker in the Suburbs

As I write, the entire city of Boston is on lockdown. All businesses, offices and schools are closed. No public transit, no street life. Seven and a half million people told to stay inside as police comb the streets looking for the second suspect in the marathon bombings.

Across the country, a town leveled by a fertilizer explosion searches for victims and buries its dead.

And finally, an Elvis impersonator who struggled with mental illness is accused of sending Ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials.

Try putting this in a novel and your editor (if you had one) would protest. Unbelievable! Too much! Take some of it out!

But this isn’t a novel.

Lately at lunch I’ve taken to walking around the Capitol. It’s only a few minutes from my office and I can stroll around it in 20 minutes or so, perfect if I don’t have much time.

The place has no bad angles. It’s grand and imposing no matter how it is viewed. The dome (finished 150 years ago; its completion of great importance to President Lincoln, a metaphor for uniting the divided country) is at its best against a blue sky. But even on cloudy winter days the building has its charms.

In the last two months I’ve watched as the West Front platform has been built, the fences have gone up and the chairs been arranged. The people’s place? Not exactly.

I’ll be glad when the inauguration is behind us and ordinary citizens can walk around the Capitol again.

In our neck of the woods the new year starts off with good news. A football championship, the lowest murder rate in years and a last-minute agreement to avert the fiscal cliff.

More to the point for a walker: No snow or ice on the ground and a lighter, balmier feel to the air this morning.

Before I amble out the door, a look back at the blog: 308 posts on everything from autumn to Africa to the retirement of my late, great flip phone. (Every year my family composes a funny “out” and “in” list — a shameless rip-off of a Washington Post “Style Section” tradition — and one of the 2012 items is “OUT: The flip phone Mom never answers” and “IN: The smartphone Mom never answers.”)

 Which is to say that some things never change. Not exactly what one wants to be reminded of on this day of resolutions (more on those later). But worth a thought or two just the same.

Happy 2013!

Work, Christmas shopping, decorating — with all the distractions of the season I’ve been too busy to think about the end of the world, which will happen in a few hours according to the Mayan calendar.

As I began to write this post, I remembered writing about the end of the world before. Thirty minutes later I found the entry (so much for my filing system). It was May 21, 2011, a day when some Christians expected the Rapture.

Today, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, it’s easy to understand these apocalyptic predictions. The days grow shorter and darker. Who’s to say they won’t go away entirely?

We can make all the jokes we want about the end of time (no need to finish your holiday shopping!), but ultimately, isn’t it all about fear? 

So here’s to an end of our end-of-the-world worries. And to the end of fear, too.