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A Month of Sundays?

A Month of Sundays?

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Furloughed Pentagon employees may have gone back to work, but plenty of federal workers have not, so the commute and the walk are still very much like Sunday.

Instead of parking on the back ramp or the front ramp in the Metro garage, I park on the lower deck. Yesterday afternoon it took me a few minutes to find my car; I’d started looking for it too far back.

In one way, of course, this makes living easy, like I’ve suddenly been upgraded to first class. On the other hand (and I can’t believe I’m saying this), it makes me feel lonely. Where is the jostling, the great burst of pedestrian power? Where are my compatriots?

A Walk and a Chase

A Walk and a Chase

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Day before yesterday, as often happens on Wednesdays, I was a walker in the city. And because it was the first full day of shutdown (many federal employees having come in on Tuesday to sign papers before being furloughed), I strolled through an eerily quiet D.C.

I angled down New Jersey to the Capitol and walked around it to First Street, N.E. The police were in full force and I remember thinking, this is probably not a good place to be today.

But the blue sky and mild air drew me along, down the hill to the Botanical Gardens (closed), past the American Indian Museum (closed), the Air and Space (closed) and across the Mall itself. Even the grass was closed.

Finally, crossing Constitution and Pennsylvania, angling up Indiana to E Street and the courts (not yet closed), I found people again, and some of the liveliness of a typical weekday afternoon.

Yesterday, as I heard police sirens racing down Constitution from my office (on lockdown), searching for news of the shooting at the Capitol (also on lockdown) I thought about Wednesday’s route.

Twenty-four hours later and I would have been crouching behind a tree.

(Yesterday’s car chase along Constitution Avenue passed a shuttered National Archives, pictured here on a more typical afternoon.)

 

Lying Still

Lying Still

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At first it seemed like any other morning. The drowsy drive to Metro, sipping tea along the way. Parking, walking, boarding a car, pulling out my journal and scribbling some thoughts.

But then I looked up, considered the time, noticed the difference.

It was the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week. And it was quiet. There were seats on train cars, places to stand on the platform, an unimpeded walk up the escalator.

These words come to mind:

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still! 

William Wordsworth, “Upon Westminster Bridge”

Shutdown!

Shutdown!

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It’s the first day of October — and the first day of government shutdown.  I’m imagining what the Metro will look like tomorrow (today, employees must still report to work, only to fill out some papers and then go home).

I imagine the trains and buses will be emptier but the roads busier. Home improvement stores will be bustling as the furloughed ones use this time to catch up on projects.

One doesn’t have to live here long to realize what a company town this is. A company town the business of which is government. A business that has shut down.

Wedding Day

Wedding Day

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There’s something in the air. Last weekend I learned of two engagements. Today I know of two weddings. One, a colleague’s, is downtown. The other is across the street. Literally. 
All week long the dust has been flying. The gardeners delivered mulch, the tent people delivered a tent (one something like this), and other rental outfits dropped off chairs and tables and a porta-potty (which I’ve heard through the grapevine is a deluxe model).
It’s the wedding of our neighbor’s father — not an event one usually associates with a parent, but delightful when it happens. 
We neighbors have the smallest of supporting roles: We will put up with the parking and the noise. We will medicate our dogs if necessary. And we will send silent cheers their way. 
I may not feel this way tomorrow morning, but right now I can say: It’s good to have a wedding in the ‘hood.
(Photo: Fairytaletentsandevents.com)
Beating the Clock

Beating the Clock

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I don’t know when cross-walks that flash “Walk” or “Don’t Walk” turned into cross-walks that give pedestrians a countdown of the seconds they have left for crossing, but I was thinking yesterday how this development has changed my walking style.

Before, I would find my cadence and stride confidently from block to block. My feet were on auto-pilot while my mind was free to wander. I stopped and started when needed.

Now if I spot a flashing “20” halfway down the block, I play beat the clock. The natural gait is gone. Instead, I race to the corner and dash across the street.The flow of thoughts is replaced by strategy. If I keep up the pace another block I can beat that light, too.

Do I get where I’m going any faster?

I doubt it.

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

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As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

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I looked it up first thing this morning. The Navy Yard is a little over two miles from my office. I could walk there in 40 minutes. That’s how close it came this time.

But despite how close it came, despite how horrific it was — the worst loss of life in a single violent incident here since 9/11/2001 — what’s most notable about this tragedy is how routine it has become.

At least there were no children killed this time, I caught myself thinking. Yet undoubtedly children were affected. Children and other innocent people. The 12 victims all had loved ones — husbands and wives, kids and parents, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues — and their lives will never be the same.

There has always been anger and hatred in the world. But anger plus gunfire is a potent combination. As Janet Orlowski of Washington Hospital Center said as she updated reporters on the condition of the wounded: “I grew up at a time when people were mad at each other, they put up their fists and they hit each other. And for some reason people have gone from fists to knives to guns.”

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Waist-High Weeds

Waist-High Weeds

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I found my neighbor, Teresa, weeding in the woods. “It’s Japanese stiltgrass,” she said, “and the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up.”

Tell me about it. I’ve been pulling it up all summer, but have never felt sufficiently ahead in my own yard to take on the common land.

But Teresa has. And does. She and her husband, David, often take a bag along on their walks to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

I do not bag and neither do I weed. Instead, I ponder the stiltgrass as I walk, notice the height of it, waist-high in spots, think about this wild vegetation taking over the woods, the fields, the yards.

It’s a green wave, a green sea, rolling ever forward. We can try to stem its tide, but we are powerless in its wake.

Big Sky

Big Sky

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It is a day of clarity and blue sky, a day that makes me dream of the West with its forever-faraway views. What would it be like to live in the open, to give up the canopy we Easterners hide beneath?

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner has some answers:

Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. …

The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it.