A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

In the library this weekend I picked up a book called Listening Below the Noise by Anne LeClaire. I’ve almost finished it, would have already had I not decided to savor the final chapter. The book grew from the author’s decision some years ago to spend a day in silence. The day brought her such peace and creative energy that she decided to spend every other Monday without speaking.

LeClaire has since become a prophet of silence, giving workshops, writing the book. The compromises she proposes — making time for a quiet morning, shutting off e-mail, slowly eating a juicy apple — graft a monastic habit onto a hectic modern life. They seem realistic enough that most any of us could finagle them.

For me they reaffirm the connection between silence and creativity, the need to withdraw in order to produce, to quiet one’s self in order to speak.

Today I almost missed my Metro stop because I was engrossed in a newspaper article about a young man chronicling endangered post offices. Evan Kalish has visited 2,745 post offices in 43 states since 2008. Yesterday he wrote about the closure of a post office in St. James, Maryland. It was tucked away in a general store and featured an imported (from Pennsylvania!) postal facade that looks like something out of a movie set.

When we lived in Groton, Massachusetts, we mailed our letters and packages from a dignified old brick post office with friendly New England clerks. It was the sort of place where people lingered, chatting about when the first snowflakes might fall. It was part of the magic of that village, a component of its character.

When we first moved to Virginia, our post office was a corner of the local hardware store. I’d wait in line there, one baby or the other on my hip, to mail an article to one of my editors in New York. Though far less picturesque than Groton, it had its own madcap charm.

Years passed, the Internet arrived, and I sent my articles by email, my letters too. And that, multiplied and magnified hundreds of thousands of times over, is why post offices are closing.

But understanding the reason isn’t the same as agreeing with it. As the post offices shut down, the small towns and hamlets lose their postmark, their centerpiece, their community center. And the world becomes a little more homogenized, a little more boring, a lot less placed.

Photo, Gosselin Group Realtors