We had an off-site thing at work today, so I ended up taking a different route home, and coming home later than usual, in the height of rush hour. I wasn't too bothered by the heavy traffic, though, because it was still warm enough to have my windows down, and the radio station I had on was playing a string of songs from 20 years ago that I hadn't heard in awhile.
Sitting at a light in front of the building where I worked in high school I had a flood of deja vu. Same route, same traffic, same music (same dj, even, sort of...he was the later night guy then, not drivetime, and on a different station, but still...same voice from when I was a kid.) I can remember leaving the office on Friday nights, cashing my paycheck (at that bank right there, although the name has changed) and gassing up the car (at that gas station)...
The rest of the way across town was like that: remembering hanging out with my friends at that McDonald's. Playing softball at that park. Swimming at that pool. Family cookouts at my uncle's house down that street.
Of course I pass these landmarks from my life all the time, because I live and work in the same place I grew up. Which is probably how most people live, but so often I hear "Washington is nothing but a transient area."
I guess it is pretty transient, but hardly "nothing but." My dad plays poker every other Friday with guys he's known since grammar school. Our next door neighbor when I was a kid was a high school classmate of my mom's. I've run into childhood playmates at the grocery store and a kid I used to babysit is now a medical tech at my doctor's office.
Some of the memories aren't so happy...I realize that stopped at the light by the funeral home I've been to for too many wakes...but I'm thinking of those friends and neighbors now. What would it be like if I didn't still live here, didn't pass these places and remember these things?
Periodically I get fed up with the traffic and congestion around here. It's a densely-populated area getting denser...another townhouse development is being shoehorned in along my usual route, and already the traffic from the first wave of finished houses has added five minutes to my morning commute. Sometimes I look at classified ads in out-of-town papers and wonder if I should try somewhere else.
But tonight I passed forsythia bushes covered in buds, and I realize that those bushes have meant spring to me for as long as I can remember. When I did live elsewhere, all of eighteen months, it wasn't just the different seasons that felt wrong to me, it was the absence of specifics...the cherry trees on my grandmother's street, the changing colors in Rock Creek park, the forsythia around my old ball field.
I never really thought about it before, but now that I am thinking...I guess this means I have roots.
Posted by Nic at March 5, 2004 08:22 PM | TrackBack