A Walker in the Suburbs

Today is the birthday of the writers Muriel Spark, Langston Hughes and Galway Kinnell. It is also the birthday of my mom, a writer who is less well known, whose pad and paper were often put aside to tend to a child or pay a bill or wait until the world was calmer before picking them up again.

But she read Shakespeare to us and talked to us of worlds beyond the one we knew. And now we are out in those worlds and she is encouraging us still.

We encourage her, too. It’s calm enough to write now, Mom. You can pick up that pad and pen. The coast is clear.

Today, before I signed in to write this entry, I was taken to a page where the new Google privacy policy was on display. I was assured that life would be easier with the new ease of transference between YouTube, Google searches and Gmail. These changes will take place March 1, Google explained, and there will be no way to opt out of them.

I had already noticed the ads Google tailored to my blog posts. They’re often funny. I might be reminiscing about our trip to Vienna two years ago and up will pop a Danube River Cruise. Doesn’t Google know that we’re still paying off our 2010 trip? (That it doesn’t is good news, actually; apparently Google does not yet have access to our bank records.)

Surely, though, it’s only a matter of time. Google has already been collecting information from my searches and YouTube viewing and from the blog posts I write here. And in little more than a month — in the name of creating a “seamless” environment — Google will be able to share all the bits of information it has collected to serve (and plumb) our deepest selves.

It’s enough to drag me back to the 20th century — or maybe the 19th.

In a survey by Travel and Leisure magazine that ranks cities in terms of rudeness, Washington, D.C. came in number 3. That’s two spots ruder than it was last year. Boston and Los Angeles were slightly less rude — and New York (in the number one spot) and Miami slightly more so.

I don’t know much about the methodology of the survey, whether it includes the suburbs of these metropolitan areas or just the cities themselves. But whatever the case, this got me thinking about the rudeness of cities versus suburbs. One seldom hears a suburb described as “rude,” perhaps because there’s not enough interaction to provoke contentious encounters. But there is one way we Northern Virginians excel in obnoxious behavior — and that’s in our cars.

We cut, we swerve, we tailgate. We run yellow lights and red ones, too. We are so rushed to get where we’re going that we act as if there are no human beings behind the wheels. My driving etiquette has deteriorated significantly since I’ve lived here. I don’t need a magazine article to tell me that.

Photo: SoMd Expert

The forecast wasn’t good. It would snow, sleet and then, later in the day, turn to freezing rain. When the going gets tough, the tough go to the library. I picked up an armful of local history books — This Was Vienna; Fairfax County Virginia: A History; Falls Church: A Virginia Village Revisited; Historic Northern Virginia; Reston: New Town in the Old Dominion and a book called Talking Tidewater: Writers on the Chesapeake.

I perused a couple of these tomes last night but was most drawn to an essay from Talking Tidewater, an excerpt from a memoir by Anne Jander called Crab’s Hole: A Family Story of Tangier Island. In the late 1940s a family moved from Connecticut to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Their house had no electricity or running water when they moved in but the family made do without it for years. I read just enough to make me want to read the whole book — and just enough to make me want to have an adventure, too. Though preferably one with electricity and plumbing.

An old house in Chincoteague, which as close as I’ve come to Tangier Island.

It’s been a little over a year since we lost our parakeet, Hermes. We raised a glass to him on Sunday, and then, on Monday, we found ourselves web-surfing parrot videos. There are some very cute bird-dancing videos out there, with the little guys bobbing and weaving and strutting their stuff.

Of course, we are biased, but we think, ounce for ounce, Hermes’ brainpower could not be beat. He could say “Hermes,” “I love you” and “Good night, moon” — among other things. He knew every sound of human approach (the garage door opening, the toilet flushing) and would chirp hello accordingly. And his sneezes were a dead ringer for the human variety.

Hermes left a hole in our hearts, one we haven’t rushed to fill. But now that it’s been a year, we are thinking about birds again.

When I was at a wake last fall I noticed a cage of finches in the lobby of the funeral home. Is there a better reminder of the sweetness of life than a bunch of small birds chirping?

It rises beside the escalator, a concrete skeleton, incomplete but unmistakable. This will not be another complicated contraption, something that can break because an errant candy wrapper gums up its works. This will be a simple pedestrian-movement enabler, stationary, providing additional caloric expenditure. This will be, in short, a stairway.

It has been in progress for months now but I’ve only just noticed it recently. And yesterday, as I rode up the escalator, I saw the risers in place, saw the sawtooth concrete waiting for its tread.

So I googled the project, learned that it is called the Vienna Station Mezzanine Stairs, that it was approved more than two years ago and that $2 million has been allotted to complete it. Two million? For a flight of stairs?

Then I think about it for a minute. As the quick, electronic and virtual become more prominent, the slow, the low-tech and the real will become more valuable. Way more valuable, if the Vienna stairs are any indication.

These stairs are from the Prague Castle. They have lasted centuries. They did not cost $2 million.

Yesterday I passed three bikers on a four-lane road. Walkers clogged our neighborhood streets. There was a lightness in the air, a feeling of lift and brightness. This is the fun side of global warming, a walk in short sleeves, the smell of mud in the air, bushwhacking through the woods and leaping over the creek.

Will we pay for this soon? Probably. But it’s nice while it lasts.

It’s not warm enough for this. But close….

I saw them the day before yesterday, a flock of robins in our front yard. I haven’t been organized enough to notice if they were here earlier, or to note their first appearance in years past. But there they were on a cold blustery winter day, pecking in our winter-wan grass, nibbling the holly berries and flitting about the leaves and wood pile.

There were more than a dozen of them, with their red breasts and trim beaks. I wondered where they had come from and if they would stay.

It’s too early to think about spring. I know that. But seeing those robins, hearing their call, feeling the warmth in the air this morning as I walked — it all has done my spirit good.

Yesterday I was driving west when I came upon a flyway. It’s a left exit that swings over two other roads on its way back to earth. Looking at such a monstrosity from below fills me with dread and anxiety. Is it safe, well built? Will I go too fast and fall off?

But these are the worries of the land lubber. Once I’m on the flyway I am in awe of the view. I can see the front line of the Blue Ridge as it extends from north to south. I am escaping the quotidian. I am, for a moment, flying.

A cold start to the new month. I drive to Metro in darkness, only the faintest lightening of the sky. I think about parking on the street and walking to the subway, as I have the last two days, but I decide on the garage instead. A train is waiting, I hop on only minutes before it leaves the station.

The day begins, as it often does, with a rattle down the tracks, the descent underground to Ballston, the switch to the Red Line at Metro Center, the quick walk to the office from Judiciary Square.

On the way I count blessings: The smooth logistics of the morning. Our celebration last night, the balm and joy that is family. How good it felt to laugh together over a book of silly pet photos. Work that busies me and pays the bills, and other work that inspires me and doesn’t pay the bills. The view from my office window: the alley, the buildings, the reflections in blue glass across the street. The view from our back deck as it looks on a winter morning.