The measure of

M.P.H. Highest degree earned. GS-level. Annual compensation. Party affiliation. Years to retirement. Number of overpriced caffeinated beverages consumed before noon. Washington, DC has specific metrics for success, for valuing one’s life, productivity, and family.

It was shortly after a friend moved from DC to Seattle, that Susanne received a call from him. He’d just come home from a party.

“You won’t believe it out here,” he said, almost breathless with excitement. “When someone asks, ‘what do you do,’ they don’t mean, ‘what is your occupation?’ They want to know your hobbies!”

Hobbies. Northwest hobbies happen largely outside. Hiking. Snowshoeing. Rafting or kayaking. They certainly have a lot of nouny verbs out here, that’s for sure. People, on average, seem willing and able not to string their identity and their vocation together, at least the way many folks do back on the east coast. “What do you do” there is met with, “I’m a contractor,” or “I’m at Census,” or “I’m an analyst,” which also wins the in-blog post prize for most vague job title ever, even worse than “project manager.” And these job titles are not transferrable outside the Beltway. Nobody in Walla Walla understands or gives a fig what I used to in DC, and I can try explaining it in a 25-50 word paragraph. It still isn’t comprehensible to normal people.

Out here, the vineyards and wheat fields and fish lifespan dictate that seasons still matter. Time isn’t gauged in project lifecycle terminology, it’s measured in the tiny center of the wheat chaff, or when the viticulturist-inclined farmer thinks it’s safe to remove the protective plastic sleeve from the 1- and 2-year-old grape vines. Or at the start and stop of the wine tourism season in Walla Walla, and the unofficial start and end dates of the summer, when people flock to western Idaho for good camping weather. There isn’t enough industry here to vie with the earth’s own grand calendar, to make people forget that once upon a time, it mattered to your livelihood that it was autumn or spring. Washington, DC only has one perpetual election season, after all. Even though the city is built on old farmland.

Spring, meanwhile, seems to have hit a little early, with the trees budding already and some very early greenness appearing in the wheat fields. Maybe soon the daffodils will come up, Stravinsky-like, with swooping wind instruments and a thunderous percussion. The ducks at the pond will start teaching very little babies to swim and jump into the water, only taking on flying in the mid-summer. People will talk about loving spring in the desert again. Bright’s chocolatiers will sell more ice cream than they have in months. Strolling down Main Street to get some will involve hearing a lot more people in the wine tasting rooms, and seeing many more cars from Seattle, but you still can’t call them traffic. You’ll be able to spot the visitors because as they walk they’ll talk about how quaint everything is. DC tourists marvel at the architecture and the monuments, but they usually still feel a bit wary, as if violence could break out next to them at any moment. Here in Walla Walla, it’s a pickpocket’s dream, because nobody, even the residents, ever has their guard up. And we’re only 3 miles from a maximum security prison.

A few years ago the soccer coach of the men’s team at the small liberal arts college here flippantly and quickly agreed to take the team to the prison for a game. It wasn’t until the bus of them rolled into the prison yard, the razor-lined gate locking behind them that he felt any degree of panic. There they were, 20 of them, on a dirt field, locked in with something like 100 hardened inmates. Guards with automatic rifles stood at a few towers. Maybe they were excited to watch a match, or maybe they were worried about how this could go horribly wrong. Or both.

The college team started playing what I can only imagine was the most surreal game of their lives. I’m not sure who refereed the game, or even if there were refs on the field. Kick, run, kick, run, collide. The prisoners had come to play. The college team practiced together every day, knew their teammates’ tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. Kick, pass, advance, the clock ticking up the minutes played. The score started getting lopsided, favoring the college. The coach started worrying about them running up the score, something Bill Belichick has never done in his life. Second half, still scoring. He wanted to pull his hair out. At least slow down, men. Don’t, no, don’t score again! Oh geez! Soccer games are not supposed to have scores of 20-2, or anything near that number.

Game finished, finally, and everyone was ragged, exhausted. The prison players high-fived the other team. Good game, good game, they said, walking in orderly lines. The college athletes piled back onto the bus, riding for five minutes and a series of circumstances away from the prison. I wonder how they look back on the experience, which measuring devices they use to interpret what that game was about.

Clark and Lewis

After a full week of overcast skies, Susanne and I decided to venture away from the Walla Walla Valley, hoping that we could pierce the cloud layer and see the sun. Now then, there are three ways out of the city, in basically a T formation: Highway 12 runs east-west at the north of town, and Highway 125 runs due south, toward Oregon. We headed east toward the little village of Waitsburg, remembering that it has a cute, pioneer town quality and gives one a chance to take in the Blue Moutains, which were considerably more snow-capped after this weekend than before. The drive was nice enough, although we didn’t escape the clouds. Given that the east coast was caught up in yet another heavy snowfall, neither one of us was too grouchy about our own weather, depressing and blase as it was.

We were curious to see a small crowd of people waving at us as we came into town—”city center” would be an overstatement, as the downtown is two blocks long and one street wide. I smiled, thinking they looked happy and small-towny, until I saw the signs they were waving. “She regrets her abortion,” one declared. I started looking for an arrow to one of the women, a la the “I’m With Stupid” t-shirts that were popular among the geek set 20 years ago, but it did dawn on me that they meant some proverbial, collective “she.”

I was not amused. I’m coming to your town, presumably to spend dollars in one of the 9 stores you house and you’re going to alienate me with pictures of aborted fetuses? Not such a smooth move, Waitsburg.

I contemplated sharing my disappointment with the throng-ette. Susanne knew where my brain was going, and helped me ascertain that expressing my opinion would probably not make the situation any better. I turned, blinker on, and drove into downtown, because I am a good liberal who follows proper traffic laws. So there, anti-choice, sign-carrying people!

We moseyed along the main street, stopping in to a curious antique store that had old Coca-Cola bottles, snowshoes, and kitchen ware, as if someone cleaned out his grandmother’s house and opened up a store with everything he’d found, minus the linoleum, but not the kitchen sink, which sat in a corner in the back room. I suppose any copper pipe he’d stripped had already sold, because that stuff goes fast.

We happened along a creek with a Lewis & Clark sculpture in front of it. It clearly was modeled after the countless “Lewis & Clark” highway markers that dot the roadways out here, in the still-wild west. My question erupted out of my brain and through my mouth.

“I always wonder which one is which.”

As we passed the sign, I turned and saw the back, as well as my answer:

Question answered.

Finishing our short walk, still out of the sun’s light, we ambled back to the car and drove out of town. I flipped off the line of activists, figuring it would give them renewed energy to hold their signs proudly in the rain.

Baking a cake standing up

Last year I was still somewhat out of commission after knee surgery when Susanne’s birthday rolled around, and by “out of commission,” I really mean, “still taking sponge baths.” This year I’m mostly back to my old form—I’ve returned to a bowling league, have kept up my routine at the gym, and can squat again when I need something from a low cabinet, which is pretty much the only time I squat—so I figured cake making would go easier this time around.

I should know by now not to make assumptions regarding the ease of anything. And still, I persist in my idiocy.

For her part, Susanne had requested a Schwartzwald Kirschtorte (say that 10 times fast), a.k.a. a Black Forest cake, but she’d thrown in a couple of twists: she wanted a layer of chocolate ganache in the middle of the cake layers, instead of the usual whipped cream and cherries, and she wanted, on advice from her mother, the cherries that go atop the cake to be dipped in chocolate. In the spirit of the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, I’ll explain the level of difficulty this entailed. Now your standard Black Forest cake, with its spongy chocolate cake layers, has a rating, under the old figure skating scale, of 3.2 out of 6 total, but because it also calls for whipped cream and systematic pricking with a fork so that it will uptake the kirschwasser liquor, has a final technical difficulty of 4.1, or in the new International Judging System, 8,237 points. Because I also had to make a ganache, dip cherries previously cured in liquor, and use that liquor as the base for a homemade liquored syrup, my new difficulty rating was a 5.8, or in the IJS, let’s see. . . carry the one . . . computing . . . 13,482 points.

But I was up to the task. I was certain of this.

While the recipe called for 7″ cake pans, presumably because the Germans enjoy smaller-sized desserts, I only had one 8″ cake pan and 3 9″ pans. What was a baker to do? I went for the 9-inchers, because 9, being a greater integer than 7, must be better. I whipped up 6 eggs, my arteries screaming no at me, blending in sugar and cocoa, and arrived at a splendidly smooth batter, which, upon pouring into the pans I could see rose to a withering height of . . . three-quarters of an inch. Hmm. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the cakes would rise in the oven.

After dutifully rotating the cake pans at the halfway mark of baking, I answered the timer’s bell and saw that indeed, they had risen. They were now one inch tall. I considered marking their progress on the kitchen wall, but instead I grabbed my car keys, wallet, and phone, and headed to the grocery store, as I was now out of eggs. And I figured I should pick up some extra whipping cream just in case.

Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of assorted dairy products, and ready for round two of cake madness. I quickly washed out the cake pans, re-buttering and flouring them, in something like double speed for this redux. I started cracking eggs again and was dismayed that I’d bought some kind of weird-shelled eggs—each insisted on leaving a little bit of itself in the bowl, so I had to fish out chips every single time.

One mixer made a new batch of chocolate cake, the other started the cream whipping process, while I melted 72 percent dark chocolate in a double boiler and made a simple syrup on another burner. Pant, pant! I was a whirlwind of confectionery! A force of baking nature!

Two more cakes popped into the oven. Chocolate was melted carefully, while the syrup boiled and oh no, started to smoke. The kitchen quickly filled with the acrid, eye-stinging fog, so I tossed the offending concoction and started again. Again. Opening the back door helped a bit, though it was mighty chilly outside.

Okay, the chocolate was ready, so I dipped cherries in the double boiler, thinking to myself that since we picked these cherries ourselves last summer, this cake was officially six months in the making. They looked cute lined up on the wax paper, drying slowly as if there weren’t a flurry of activity just a few inches away from them. I added some cream to the rest of the melted chocolate, to start the ganache portion of the program.

Finally, the layering and stacking and glazing and frosting were finished. I looked at the creation. Four hours, a dozen eggs, 20 tablespoons of butter, 3 cups of cream, 4 cakes layers, 12 ounces of dark chocolate, and many cherries later, I had this:

I was so tired and hungry from all of the cooking, I almost dropped my face into the thing and ate it all, but figured it wasn’t worth the effort to make it all over again. A few hours later, several of Susanne’s friends came over to share cake and wine in front of the fire. We oohed and ahhed over the creation and by the end of the evening, it had disappeared into our collective stomachs. Susanne enjoyed the cake but noted twice to various people, including my mother-in-law, that she only got one piece of cake out of the whole thing. So it looks like I’ll be performing again, but this time it will be the short program. A tasty, short little program.

A meeting of the minds

It was with a cavalier attitude that I called up the Census in a city near me, last week, and offered generously to join their organization, should they need me. Some employee with a name straight out of a 1950s-era reading primer, like Bill or Johnny, cheerfully informed me that there was a test in a few days near me and the exam was all that was separating me from what would surely be a stellar career with the agency. So I agreed to meet up at “the Y,” even though under many other circumstances I would have presumed some kind of gay intimacy would be involved in such an encounter. But I figured this would be a G-rated rendezvous. Johnny boy told me to show up about 15 minutes before the start of the test so I could fill out some forms, which, having already worked with and for the Federal Government, did not surprise me in the least, so I calculated that I needed to arrive at 2:45.

The same flippant approach I had on the phone was with me as I left the house, at 2:43. The Y was around the corner from where I live, and I knew a route to get there that didn’t involve even a single traffic light. I walked in to the gym, my gym, and failed to see any signs directing me to the test, so I asked the receptionist where it was.

“Oh, you must mean the Y W CA, she said,” putting such an emphasis on the “W” that she raised her voice half an octave, like she were speaking of the black sheep in her family. Oh, YWCA, tsk tsk tsk. Such a promising CA until all of that nasty business happened. YMCA and I are just still torn up about it.

She asked me if I knew where it was. I shook my head.

“Well, do you know where the ishchaly is,” she asked, suddenly speaking a foreign language.

I shook my head. “The what?”

“The ishchaly,” she said. Now she looked at me like I was utterly hopeless. I went to the wrong building and I didn’t even know where the damn Ischaly was? A look crossed her face that suggested she was wondering if she should intentionally misdirect me. She gave me a street name, Birch, and from that I could figure out where this unruly child of a building was.

Three blocks and 90 seconds later, I was at the YWCA, next to a building marked, “Ice Chalet.” This reconfirmed my belief that people just don’t give a darn about French pronunciation here in the Pac Northwest.

I looked at my watch which read 2:47, and giggled.

About 15 people were seated around tables in a large room just inside the front door. The tables were set up in a large rectangle so that we could all see each other. Against the windows the Census Bureau employee was setting up all of her supplies for the exam. She seemed more than mildly frustrated. Her hair tied back in a bun, it was starting to escape, in some vaguely direct correlation to her increasing anxiety.

“I’m just not sure why everyone is here so early,” she muttered, and I saw that she had several cat scratches on her forearms. I briefly concerned myself with how many cats she had back at home.

Three people stood around her as she sorted through manilla folders and government-issue pens. Though they didn’t realize it, they had the appearance of zombies, standing aimlessly, rocking slowly on their feet, waiting for her to notice them so they could hear her screams and eat her brains.

“Okay folks,” she asked them, pencils clattering to the floor, “can you just sit down and I’ll get to you. The test doesn’t start until 3:30.”

We told her we’d all been instructed to get here a little before 3. There was some nervous laughter around the room.

Well, we were informed, we were going to take this test at 3:30. And someone in the Richland Census office was going to get an earful from Stacy the Overworked Coordinator. After a long day of no thanks, all she gets are feral cats.

More people trickled in, all before 3. We learned that the fella who’d given us all the wrong start time was named Scott. Bad, bad Scott.

I looked at my fellow Walla Wallans who’d showed up for this exam. There were a lot of retirement-age men and women, some young 20s folks, a few 30-somethings like myself. One woman sat down who looked like she was in the midst of a bad affair with crystal meth. I’m not sure if she really even knew where she was, but she’d thought to bring her ID to qualify for the application.

An older man, in the midst of filling out the Census job form, raised his hand and asked, “What if my supervisory experience is old?”

“It doesn’t matter how old it was,” said Stacy, sorting through the test forms and answer sheets.

“What if it was 50 years ago? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” His sudden laughter shot around the room like semi-automatic fire. I jumped out of my chair a little.

3:10 and we all had our I-9s and job applications to complete. The woman to my right slowly screwed her pencil into her own little sharpener. She wanted to know if she could have extra scratch paper for all the math problems on the test. Clearly no one had informed her that this was not the GRE subject test in math. She was one of those chitchatters who at least waited for eye contact before beginning their monologues. I know how to look at my hands really well, so I was safe, for the most part. The person on the other side of her was not so lucky.

The form asked if I had registered for the Selective Service. Damn it. I checked the no box, and filled in the explanations box two pages over. Hopefully Stacy wouldn’t ask me in front of everyone what “transgender” meant.

One man, near a corner of the room, tried to pick his nose on the down low. Gotta have clean nasal passages to deal with the stress of such a rigorous test as this.

A younger, cockier man said he had a question, which Stacy deferred. “I just need a little more time to get ready,” she said, laughing nervously. “I just don’t know why Scott would tell everyone to come so early, hee hee.”

Scott is trying to drive you crazy, Stacy, that’s why. Maybe you stuck Scott with one of your feral cats, and he wants payback. I’ll never know.

She passed out the test, telling us to check that our answer sheets and test booklets have the same code, A, B, C, or D. The guy who people realized 50 years ago shouldn’t supervise anyone looked alarmed suddenly. His codes didn’t match. Stop the presses! Stacy came over and said, no, sir, this code right here. He’d been trying to match up the Census form numbers. I was just impressed a 70-year-old could read 4 point font. But I wasn’t so sure he was what the Census had in mind for a long form interviewer. Nor was the woman on my right, a.k.a. Nervous Nellie.

“Everyone has these new Passports now,” she said to her table-mate. “I haven’t been out of the country in so long, I’m not sure they’d give me a passport.”

Someone needed to tell her that if prior foreign travel was the prerequisite for getting a passport, nobody would have a passport.

At 4:10 Stacy let us begin the test. Twenty-eight questions.

Seriously? Twenty-eight questions? All this for 28 questions?

The exam was broken into 5 areas, including 6 questions on math. I hoped Nervous Nellie’s 5 pages of scrap paper were enough. One math question was really tricky: add 3.17, 12.6, and 258. Ooh, those tricky, tricky decimal points! I need some scrap paper for this!

Another question asked us to match up people’s names in two columns. This reminded me of some bad database errors I’d worked on in 2004 for the National Institutes of Health. And because I’d worked with Census before, on standards for data collection, I started wondering if I wasn’t having a mini-Slumdog Millionaire moment where every test question could be answered via some prior experience I’ve had with the government. Only instead of winning 30 million rupees I’d get a $11.75 per hour job wandering around Walla Walla county, trying not to get shot for being a temporary Fed. So it was really like the same situation, totally.

I finished the test first, which doesn’t mean I was the smartest in the room, but next to “Don’t let that guy supervise anyone, ” Nervous Nellie, and Meth Face, I wasn’t surprised to be at the head of the pack. No sooner did I think that, however, than Meth Face put down her pencil. And then seemed to eye it longingly, as if it were a thick, juicy ribeye.

Stacy called 15 minutes remaining. Unlike the actual GRE, one was not permitted to leave if one finished early. So I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. At 4:35 Stacy called 5 minutes left. The last 10 had already been the longest of my life. But no way was I going to leave only to have to come back for a retest, people watching what it is.

Finally, she called the end of the test. Nervous Nellie immediately began chattering away. She turned to her weary desk-mate.

“Did you see him finish so early? So early! Just wham! Put his pencil down and took a nap! I wanted to just copy his answers but we have different test numbers.”

Those clever Census people, two steps ahead of a woman with her own pencil sharpener.

Stacy collected all of the exams and told us she just had a couple of things left to tell us. She read straight off of the Census guide for oh, four sentences or so, but then began embellishing.

“Remember, Census Bureau staff have to make a lot of follow up calls. If you don’t hear from us by March, you might not be hearing from us. We can’t call everyone back who applies for a job with us. But if we do call, be nice. If you make us laugh, we’ll be very grateful. So here’s something you could say, but don’t all say it or they’ll know I coached you.”

It took me a moment to comprehend that she was babbling, and then I heard her suggestion for making someone laugh on the phone.

“What did the one snowman say to the other snowman? ‘Smells like carrots.’” A few people chuckled obligingly. There is no way in hell I am going to tell this joke to the Census if they call me, I thought.

A man across the room raised his hand, indicating he had a question. What the hell could it be now? I just wanted to get out of here already. I had slumped down so far in my chair only the top 2 inches of my ass was actually still on the seat. Maybe I could just slither across the floor and into my car.

“Yes,” Stacy asked the man with the raised hand.

“They could also say, ‘all I see is black.’” Silence. And then he mumbled under his breath, “you know, because they have coal for eyes, see.”

I considered stabbing my ears out with my number 2 pencil.

Finally, we were dismissed. I did my best not to look disrespectful, but I was happy to breathe some non-YWCA air.

Thirty minutes later, I was on the road, headed to the bowling alley in Tri-Cities for my weekly league night. A few frames into the first game, my cell phone rang.

It was Stacy. I hadn’t checked a box indicating that I had my own transportation. I briefly considered telling her a joke, then decided against it. I thanked her for calling and answered her question, and then thought about carrots and coal.

Electing to

Last week, the voters spoke and changed the landscape of a state for the foreseeable future. I was beyond excited to see my fellow countrymen and women take the time to consider the ramifications of their vote, get educated on the issue, and cast their ballots. One million strong. A mandate, even.

It is a special feeling to know one has backed a winner.

Kirsten is the newest California cow! Go Kirsten!

She was my sentimental pick because she’s from Saskatchewan, homeland of my own mother. This isn’t to say that none of the other eight choices would have done well as the newest addition to the Real Milk Comes from California family, but Kirsten has her own place in my heart. With a jouissance I ventured to the Real MilkTM Web site to relish in my skosh of glory and see Kirsten frolicking in the pastures of the Golden State.

But what met my retinas was not the heifer I knew and loved. Or thought I knew. This, this was some imposter cow! The election officials surely thought they could fool everyone, but I know very well that cows don’t change their spots, or patches, or whatever the hell they’re called. These spots were different!

Don’t take just my word for it, check it out on your own. Look at Kirsten’s audition tape, and then look at one of the clips after her win. Yes, the voice is the same, but the cow, the cow is different. That’s just plain creepy.

So now, my heart aches. Where is my beloved farm girl? Did a Canadian wolf get her and California has now gone to some clandestine cover-up to keep their so-called election intact? Did Kirsten opt out to seek her fortunes in the next misdirected balloon saga? Did she sneak away to LA early so she could see a plastic surgeon and have a makeover? California’s Real Dairy farmers, tell us what’s become of our small town girl turned starlet!

Did Gary Condit have anything to do with it?

The glee of google

Dear Person Who Searched for “KY His and Hers Jelly,” and got my blog instead:

My apologies. It must have been frustrating to think that you were about to get vital information on lubricant for sex, only to arrive at this blog instead. Especially frustrating because I really don’t even mention it anywhere, in all 100+ posts. I do speak briefly, however, on the “his and hers” concept, from a humorist perspective. Perhaps that will suffice for your needs? Best of luck in your endeavors!

Dear Person Who Searched for “Fat Man on Cruise,” and got this blog:

I don’t think I like the comparison between your search entry and my personal life, but I blame Google, not you. After all, there are a lot of larger people on cruises. Perhaps you should narrow your search a bit. Meanwhile, it’s my right to take a cruise if I want to. I generally stayed away from the endless salad bar, because I generally don’t like eating under the scowls and frowns of other people. Hey, maybe that could be turned into a dieting strategy.

Dear Person Who Searched for “man/woman costume,”:

I actually wrote a scathing commentary about the offensiveness of such a costume, and as I don’t actually sell anything on this site, you won’t actually find one to purchase here. And if I were going to sell anything, the top of my inventory list wouldn’t include this crap. Nor would the bottom. Thanks and have a nice day.

Dear Multiple People Who Search for “MRI ACL tear,” and get my blog by mistake:

I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it, in all of its popping glory. I limped around for a while, got a bad diagnosis, then an accurate one (which somehow cost less), had my surgery, did my rehab, and graduated. Now it’s over. So I’d like to move on. You are stopping me from moving on. I can appreciate the motivation behind searching for other people’s MRI images, especially ones with helpful arrows, since really, we’re all staring at something that’s not there, which is tough to do. But you’re messing with my sense of closure now, so please, tell Google they’re mis-directing you. Because all this dwelling on my knee is depressing.

Dear Hundreds of People Searching for “Mao Ze Dong,” “Maozetong,” “Mao Te Zong,” and “Maotetong,” who come to this blog daily:

My apologies that you came seeking information on the famous leader and instead got a story about my friend’s toddler’s dearly departed fish. But thank you for making that blog post my all-time top-read post. If you actually read it, that is. And hey, I’m mildly impressed with Google’s thesaurus ability, because people practically type in “masfjkdsfiasdfk” and it manages to be read as a search for him. There’s just a little hiccup with the actual destination link, so perhaps Google should put some of their thesaurus developers over on the content-finding side of the operation.

Dear People Who Searched for “Everette Maroon blog,”:

Close, but no cigar [sic]. I have no cigar, either, so there’s no love lost. But my first name isn’t like “barrette,” okay?

Dear People Who Searched for “Everett Maroon blog,”:

Yippee!!! You win! Prize to be awarded in the form of blog content. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Dear People Who Will Search for “Glee” and “Google” tomorrow and get this blog instead:

My apologies in advance. But thanks for stopping by!

The 2010 Tour of Babies

Leaving or entering Walla Walla from anywhere more than 350 miles away entails, as previously documented on this blog, a minimum of 14 hours and multiple modes/legs of transportation. Our longest trip was our original relocation, which took seven days, and our shortest one occurred a few days ago, when we left for the airport at 9:15AM Eastern Standard Time and rolled into our garage at 8PM Pacific. Most of our commutes have run somewhere around 17 hours, which I suppose was mind-alteringly fast at some point in history. Lewis and Clark, for example, took 3+ years to reach the West Coast after leaving Philadelphia. And they didn’t even have Delta’s complimentary biscotti cookies, noted by me as the only high point of traveling on their airline.

Taking our three flights to Michigan, then spending 10 days at the inlaws, during which it snowed 7 times, and then gritting our teeth for what we hoped wouldn’t be an awful Detroit airport experience—seeing as the “underwear bomber” had been Motor City-bound—we made it to BWI Airport, found our luggage, took the shuttle to the car rental building, drove to have lunch with some friends, drove for an hour to our first host family’s house, and walked in the door. We were met, three inches past the threshold, by our 3-year-old friend.

“Would you like to play Candy Land with me? Would you like to play Candy Land with me? Would you like to play Candy Land with me,” she asked, sounding like Cameron Diaz after sucking down a couple of helium balloons.

I presumed she really wanted to get her inquiry across to us.

Her mother attempted to wave her away, saying that good hosts don’t accost their guests the nanosecond they arrive, but she would not be daunted.

“Come play Candy Land with me,” she said, switching to the declarative. I sensed we weren’t getting out of a game, and I grinned. One had to admire her panache.

We sat on the floor and played, and luckily, I remembered the rules from when last I played, in 1974. There seem to be some additional characters on the board, mostly in the form of princesses, that I don’t specifically recall, but I stumbled through with the whole card picking thing. If our friend selected any of the “princess cards,” the ones that send players to the gingerbread man, candy cane, ice cream cone, and so forth, she would begin a dance, which I quickly learned must be part of the new 21st Century version of Candy Land. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to recreate the exact dance moves, so I crossed my fingers that I’d only get the one or two gumdrop cards, slowly creeping forward through the Land that Candy Made.

And then we were done.

“Let’s play Candy Land,” she chirped, as if this were a new idea.

Occasionally she would start telling a story about people whom nobody in the room knew, including her parents. Were these people real or imagined? It didn’t help that in every retelling names and details would change, like watching Fox News discuss numbers of people attending a DC rally. She literally was a whirlwind of energy, doing impromptu impressions of the Tazmanian devil. We adored it.

A few nights later we visited some other friends who had a baby in September. This baby was cute and mellow, looking around the room, slowly twiddling his fingers and feet, enjoying his bouncy chair with a love he won’t see ever again, not that he’s focused on any element of nihilism at the moment. But he of course didn’t talk, was just past figuring out how to hold his head up. And it was in the showing off all the things he can’t do yet that we had our first taste on this trip of the plethora of baby-related products that one could buy if one was:

1. besmitten with copious amounts of spare time

2. an impulse buyer

3. a hoarder

4. disturbed enough to think that they needed even a quarter of these things

For they plopped the little guy into this irregularly shaped piece of plastic called a Bumbo, and there he was, sitting up. Their baby looked much like the one in the link—totally uninterested in this angle. But he really had no say in the matter.

The parents, for their part, wouldn’t put him in anything that he wasn’t enjoying, and he did seem pleased to be in the molded chair. Of course, he was so laid back he also enjoyed his bouncy seat, his parents’ arms, heck, it’s only a matter of time before he starts riding the German shepherd like a horse. I just couldn’t help wondering if I’m going to plunk down $40 for a Bumbo when I have a 3-month-old. Will I give my baby head hold up lessons so we can advance to the Bumbo faster? Will it be seen someday as an indicator for which day care kids can attend?

The next day we moved our temporary housing location to a new set of friends and their 21-month-old son. He is in the midst of his language explosion, so he has a lot more room to grow to get to our Candy Land aficionado’s vocabulary level, but these things come in time, or so I’m told. I arrived to his home and he was quiet, trying to remember me from somewhere, not sure if speaking would give anything away to me. Give this kid a job with the NSA.

Or maybe not. After only about 15 minutes, he was interacting with me. I won him over with blocks, apparently, in that I would make towers and he would knock them down, a blue-eyed version of Godzilla, and their IKEA table downtown Tokyo. Boom, went the blocks. Giggling, went the baby. At one point he picked up a bright red shovel and used that as an extension of his terrible power.

“Shuffle,” he squealed. “Fun!”

His words, more limited, sometimes bordered on incoherent, and we would all do our best to interpret them. This then made me understand that parents everywhere sometimes don’t have a clue what their kids are saying.

“Me go MILK fishy chol-nuff,” he said at one point.

“Ohhhh,” I said, not comprehending. Perhaps context would help me out, like when I was a high school sophomore in French 2. “And then what happened,” I asked.

“Fishy chol-NUFF!”

Clearly I wasn’t getting any closer. Although “nuff” was obviously important to the concept.

On Saturday we met up with yet another couple who have two children, a 4-year-old (well, really 4 and a half, she tells me) and a 6-month-old, who is a spitting image of the fat Buddha, with some wispy curly hair on top. If this child doesn’t grow up to be a Sumo wrestler, we will all be a little worse off. His father, it should be noted, is something like a 6-foot-5 rugby player. That he told me to come practice sometime with his team, when I still lived in DC, I can see in retrospect is truly laughable. By “come to practice,” he must have meant, “I’d like to bench press you.” And somehow I suppose I would be honored, though I bet I’m lighter than what what he can press, even with my 32 BMI.

Rugby player, 4 and a half year old and I wandered through Eastern Market, one of my favorite places on the entire East Coast, if I were asked to hierarchize it. The little girl is stunning to look at, clever, and is more than a little bit aware of both. One older woman recognized the two of them, and told him to watch out for her as she gets older, because she is going to bring the boys home. He declared that he wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned. And he shouldn’t be, for this kid has a wicked smart brain in her head, already.

We stopped in a children’s clothing and goods store, which he told me he calls “Bougie Baby.” The name is appropriate. They sell personalized crib covers for $90 and pacifier holders for $10. They had stocked strollers that had more options than my Honda CR-V. That the DC sidewalks are often made of very uneven bricks, well, that’s why they make strollers with shocks and struts. And in a full line of earth-friendly colors.

All week everyone wanted to know how our own baby making plans were coming along. I wondered idly if it wasn’t because they are more than ready to hand off all of the crap they’ve picked up since bringing their children into the world. Hopefully the shipping rates to Walla Walla will be cost-prohibitive, though secretly, I wonder if I can’t find a use for a dozen Boppies, or at least use one as a pillow on my next 15-hour journey out of town.

White people’s wants

During the last mayoral election cycle in Washington, DC, I couldn’t walk ten feet before some campaigner would come up and accost me. Shopping at Eastern Market. Walking down H Street in Northeast to catch a bus. Drinking coffee at the tax-thieving, now-defunct Murky Coffee on 7th Street SE. It was at this last location that one of the candidates herself, Linda Cropp, came up to me to stump, one-on-one.

“I’m here today because I want to tell people that this is everyone’s city,” she said, a bright red baseball cap sporting her name perched lightly on her head, presumably so as not to mess her hair too much.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by everyone’s city. Back in 2006, home prices were skyrocketing and “everyone” was getting priced out of living in the expensive District.

“It’s a great time to live in DC,” she went on, explaining that city residents have a median income of $82,000.

“Actually,” I said, “that’s the median income for the DC metropolitan area, including Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia. The DC-only median income is under $30,000. And I disagree with your vote on the ballpark last year—that thing is going to cost us taxpayers way more than  $800 million.” I smiled, like tacking on a gold star to the end of a painful root canal.

She smiled thinly, thanked me for my time, and moved on. But I wondered about the catering I’d just had. Cropp, an African-American woman from Georgia, many years in DC politics, and she was reading me as another white gentrifier of a historically black city. And how could I argue with that? Wasn’t I white (as per the US Census), and wasn’t I making my home in a refurbished (well, kind of) 1930’s-era apartment building? Why shouldn’t she stump to my perceived interests?

Except they weren’t my interests, even as I called 13th Street NE my home. And I’d overheard plenty of entitled conversations from new DCists who thought that their mere presence was bettering the city around them in something like a 5-block radius. “I just got a raise, I’m so glad DC will have a quarter of it in taxes,” “This is my city now,” and other comments not worthy of the time it takes to type them.

Watching the racial demographics of the city shift, other conflicts began to rise up in the late Williams-era/early Fenty years. Let’s put microphones in “residential” areas so police can pinpoint where gun shots have been fired. Let’s crack down on kids lighting fireworks on the 4th of July—hoodlums! Let’s crack down on prostitutes, because Giulliani had the right idea. Let’s reassess homes, because a lot of people seem to own their houses outright and they shouldn’t get to skirt their contributions to the city.

Fifteen years ago the city was 70 percent African-American. Today it is barely above 50 percent. Twenty thousand people of color left the city last year, and approximately 40,000 white people moved in. With them have come the Harris Teeter groceries, a Target store, loads more coffee houses (still no Pacific Northwest-style drive through espressos, though), and plenty more overpriced little bistros and eateries. During our vacation last week we shared one salad and each had a tea and a small dessert. $45, no kidding. I’d plunked money down like that before, but my salary was strong, so I didn’t flinch too much at it, even as a nagging doubt that I was getting ripped off could be heard in the recesses of my retail-addled brain.

Is this the city for everyone? Is this anyone’s vision? The gay strip bars of Southeast are gone, having been displaced for the brand-new, immediately awful Washington Nationals baseball team. Loads of condo building are still in some state of erection, all around the stadium. Where they’ve knocked down historic row houses they’re now putting up old-looking, new townhomes, a Rockwell version of DC. The people who staff services in the city—the hotel housekeepers, the baristas, the employees at that gleaming Harris Teeter—can’t afford to live in the city anymore, so they find 60s-era apartments in neighboring counties and ride into town, where they used to live. Crosstown buses aren’t as crowded anymore, with the white folk driving in carpools or biking. Whatever it takes to feel Grrrreat! about taking up city space.

If there were ever a bill that expressed the dire financial condition of a DC and the revised alignment of its politic, it’s got to be the nickel surcharge for all plastic and paper bags that went into effect this year. Doesn’t everyone have three or four Whole Foods canvas bags for their groceries? They’re only $10 each! Don’t we all love our planet enough to get rid of plastic bags? As for paper, well, you’re too far gone if you like those, or you’re trying to hide your 40-ounce malt. Those people should have to pay more, anyway.

Hey, DC’s H Street commission banned buying one 40-ounce a few years ago, even as they didn’t ban buying a six-pack of microbrew hefeweisen. I could see where things were going even then. Interest-only mortgages were the hot item, and the new owners didn’t like seeing drunk guys in Carhart jackets standing around on the sidewalks. It ruined their views of the other new apartment buildings. I’d moved into the neighborhood myself, a bit north of Lincoln Park, a couple blocks south of the H Street corridor.

“It’s up and coming,” one lady on the sidewalk told me as I was moving in. She was standing next to a woodpile. I found this odd because it was early September.

“Is it? That’s nice,” I said, sweating. September in DC is akin to the fourth circle of Hell, for those of you who have never experienced either. I can’t really recommend it.

I asked her why she had so much hardwood on her front lawn. Her brown brick house looked tiny compared to the apartment building that abetted it.

She explained that she’d thought she was paying for it to be stacked next to her house, but that the deliverymen had just dumped it and left. So I stacked the cord for her, and split several—okay many—of the bigger logs for her. Unbeknown to me, all the little old ladies of the street watched me, probably with one eyebrow raised in question as to my integrity. I passed the test, and I noticed that they—I was told to refer to them as old-timers for their age and longevity on the block—would always give me a head nod or hello when I saw them. I wasn’t sure I was very different from any other neighborhood newbie, but I tried to be respectful and appreciative of the history they had here. I was probably going to be just a blip in the time span of this place, and as it turned out, 5 years does equate to blip status. When I needed help a few months later getting a new mattress into my 3rd floor walkup, one of the old timers sent her grandson out to help me. He did look a little perturbed at first, especially upon seeing the narrow stairwells, but he and I got the mattress to the top and I gave him 10 bucks for his trouble. And two brownies, one of which I told him to give to his grandmother.

I miss having a neighborhood. I’m certain parts of Walla Walla have them, with their little give-and-take agreements: your kid can play on my lawn, do you mind if I park my car here this week, how about going into building a fence with me. But living right next to the campus recycling center, and a student building, we are not primed for friendly neighbors. So I wonder what has happened to 12th and 13th Streets NE, where I lived by myself and then with Susanne. I wonder who lives in my old apartments, and if they’re as tentative about the space they occupy as I was. I wonder when it will be when I have real neighbors again. And I wonder what is happening to DC, and if it is losing itself as it loses the people who have held its history for so long.

Potholes never move

On Tuesday I met an old friend for lunch. She’s also a life coach, and extremely new age, if one can say that spirituality comes in degrees. She’s said more than once that there’s a reason I found myself in a little town as isolated as Walla Walla, since my writing wasn’t really happening in the busy bustle of DC. Well, I have oodles of time to write now.

She’s from Nebraska, which I can only imagine, having never set foot in the state. In my mind it’s somewhere between the musicality of Oklahoma and whirling dervishes of Kansas, a state for whom I can only name three places: Omaha, Lincoln, and Platte, because my grandmother had relatives there. All the people I know from Nebraska, who also happen to number three, know farm life well, remember it fondly, and are the kind of folks who proudly announce, when they first meet someone, “I’m from Nebraska,” as if we’ll all have the same reference point. I’m quite sure none of us do. For easterners who only seldom cross the Mississippi, Nebraska is part of the “other” United States. We figure they’re flying the same Stars & Stripes, as us, but beyond that, it may as well be the surface of Mercury. Now that I live westward of ole Miss, I know this isn’t true. They’re just like easterners except quieter, often working with fewer resources, and ruggedly independent. They don’t need the east like we think they do.

What I’ve gathered from my friend is that she is a 21st Century person born nearer to the start of the 20th. She’s never more than nine inches from her PDA, and she handles it with an ease that I, a Generation Xer, never seem to manage, always cursing at a typo on my texting screen and feeling the urgent need to press BACK sixteen times to fix my mistake. She just hammers through on her iPod or whatever new device has just hit the market. She’ll have an Android sometime in the next hour, I’m sure. And for her it’s more than simple, or even amazing technology;  it’s the universe helping us feel more connected to each other, because there’s a positive force that comes with being proximate to our fellow life travelers.

She’s helped me beyond measure, as she helps everyone around her with her warm smiles, booming laughter, and occasional quick frowns that pop up when she wishes you’d behave differently. She tells me that I have one of the loudest interior critics she’s ever met, and that the next time it hovers over me I should just tell it to go away and retire. Such silliness, I have thought, at these kinds of declarations from her. And then the next time I think about writing and I castigate myself for thinking I have the right to waste my time like this, I hear her:

Oh, you again? You know, I am really so sick of you. It’s time for you to retire.

Could it really be that simple?

I look around. Nobody but me is in earshot. I speak her words into the air.

And then I start a new short piece. One that’s been kicking around for eight years or so, and that I’m positive I started writing a long time back. I can find no evidence of it, but I have sharp visions in my brain, scenes and characters and a plot surprise at the end of 3,500 words. I hate starting something all over when I know there’s even a piece out there, my wounded Marine on the battlefield that I’ve promised to retrieve.

I give up the ghost and start over, figuring that at least this way I won’t be burdened by past efforts.

I thank my friend for helping me with a sageless exorcism.

This trip has been good for pieces of me I’ve neglected since moving out west—the ones with unbridled optimism, the sanctuary for my bones by the old and familiar, the joy that comes with knowing how to avoid every pothole on a certain road you haven’t traveled in a long while. It shows me what I’m missing from Walla Walla, even though there are many things I enjoy and even love about that place. I’m missing the fullness of a boisterous life. I don’t know as many opinionated, brash people, have as many options, or have to tune out much noise. Even the frequent wailing of firetruck sirens has heartened me since we returned to the nation’s capitol, the only time Susanne has been here since President Obama took office. Walla Walla doesn’t have enough noise for me, although its springs come close to meeting my requirements for color, with the bright green, baby wheat, bold blue skies, and rainbow-infused balloons during the annual hot air stampede. I can relish Walla Walla for the quiet and agree with my Nebraskan friend that it’s given me—forced me, even, into—writing time, pushing me to reconsider what success means and who I am capable of being in this lifetime.

But while I’m here in DC, I can at least try to unite these selves—past and present—a little, and enjoy all of the good things in my life, which starting with Susanne, are plentiful.

The beltway is no cause for alarm

My life working for the Federal Government as an IT person wasn’t far removed from your average Dilbert comic strip.

Web Developer: Hey Ev, please take a look at this one screenshot and tell us what we should change with this very complex information system.

Me: Uhhhhh, just from one screenshot?

WD: It’s all we could do on the color printer.

Me: Why?

WD: Our office manager is making budget cutbacks.

Me: Ah. (Stares at printout close to face) Well, it looks like you’re calling the system three different things.

WD: Just pretend they’re all the same.

Me: Okaaaaay. Which is the actual name?

WD: EKS.

Me: Can we spell out the name for new users?

WD: Just new users?

Me: No, spell out the name at the top here, so that even new users will know what system they’re working in.

WD: Oh, I don’t think we can do that.

Me: Why not?

WD: Because it’s an image.

Me: You could just put text there.

WD: Oh, but then it might look a little different on people’s screens.

Me: Well, not very different.

WD: The communications director wants it to look the same on everyone’s computers.

Me: That’s not actually possible, you know.

WD: Don’t tell her that.

Me: Okay, okay. How about we just change the color of this black font?

WD: Okay, why?

Me: Because against this dark blue background, it’s a little hard to read, is all.

WD: Well, but it matches a paper brochure.

Me: I’ve never seen a paper brochure for this.

WD: It came out in 1987.

Me: Uh. So we need to match it why?

(Pause)

WD and Me in unison: Communications Director.

Me: I don’t think I have any recommendations, then.

WD: Okay, great! Thanks!

Coming back to visit DC has been unexpectedly revealing; I almost instantly reverted back to my aggressive-is-defensive driving skill set, weaving and bobbling a tiny Hyundai Accent on the BW Parkway on the drive in from the airport. I feel like I’m getting out of a clown car every time I park, and like I’m entering a parallel Universe of Small Things each time I climb inside, folding into myself like an origami swan. Or maybe it’s like a beam of light being crushed into nothingness, since the interior is small enough to be black hole-sized.

I cavorted through the streets of the city, not stopping to take in the things I’ve seen many times, like the Washington Monument, Union Station, the semi-empty used car lot on Bladensburg Road. But I could feel the energy from them, remembering who I’ve been before, and enjoying their proximity once again. I certainly have a fondness for the Colville Street Patisserie in Walla Walla, as I’ve remarked before, but I don’t feel any sense of being when I’m walking down Main Street like I do on the grimy marble curbs of the District, and I’m not sure yet why that is.

I lunched with some of my old Social Security coworkers in a tavern yesterday that was all Baltimore: framed posters of Ravens glory, hard-looking women with over-styled hair, “limited” drink refills, and a certain filmy substance on all of the wood surfaces that gave you the impression they cared as much about you here as if you were a guest in their homes. I was back. We chatted about things, and although I wanted to hear how they were doing, they kept asking me about Walla Walla, so I coughed up all the funny stories I could recall. It helped that I was in a company of people who presumed, first and foremost, that I have competence; sitting around on my ass at home has almost erased my sense that I am good at some things other than sitting on my ass and memorizing lines from NCIS, just in case I have the opportunity to throw them into conversation. I was hoping for but didn’t get pictures of new spouses or children, but we caught up nonetheless. With them having to get back to work, a concept with which I was suddenly reminded, I hopped back on the freeway and battled the self-important traffic of the Baltimore-Washington corridor, feeling a little sleepy from my chicken salad and kaiser roll. My “limited” drink refill apparently equated to no refill at all, and I needed a nap. I could have taken in the cityscape, the Potomac, the Pentagon, as I sped back to my host’s house in Arlington, spitting distance from where I used to live, but instead I got a song from Ladytron stuck in my head that used to play during my long commutes home. Apparently my brain saw it fit to replay for me.