Bigger perspectives

This afternoon, I went for a run downtown to wind down and took a detour through my grandparents' old neighborhood. I passed the house where they lived for much of my childhood, before they moved down south when I was around 10. I don't pass through that neighborhood often, so it always startles me when I find the house looking about half the size it does in my mind. Some of the changes can be attributed to lack of upkeep on the part of the new owners--the untrimmed bushes that block the windows, the overgrown garden, the paint that peels in some spots--but I know the expansive porch where I see my grandfather smoking his pipe in my mind's eye is still the same one that is tucked away in a corner now, and that the looming staircase hasn't shortened into the one there today that I could take in a few leaps. I grew up in that house, and yet it looks almost like something I saw in a dream once. I imagine it's a similar feeling to when you meet someone at a high school reunion years after graduation and find it hard to place the image of the dreamy football star you remember from high school in the bald, paunchy, dilapidated person you see before you.

It's almost the exact opposite situation when I visit Washington, D.C. Before I visited on a business trip last June, I had only been there once, on an eighth grade school field trip. I vaguely remember being near the Lincoln Memorial walking along the National Mall at dusk, and walking by a big white building in the pouring rain, that I honestly can't place. I remember clearly who I roomed with in the hotel we occupied, the scandal that ensued after two classmates of opposite sexes were rumored to have sneaked a rendezvous in the boy's room after bedtime, and being shocked when a stranger sat down at a table my friends and I were occupying in a crowded cafeteria while we ate lunch somewhere. I don't even have pictures to refresh my memory: this was all before the days of digital cameras, and a friend offering to help me load my film into my camera did it incorrectly.

So when I visit now, I find it hard to associate what has quickly become one of my favorite cities with the dreary D.C. that barely made an impression on me beyond the chance to stay in a hotel with my friends. On that same business trip last June, I wandered around the National Mall for a few hours one warm afternoon, then sat by the Washington Monument and called my best friend to tell her I was moving there someday. I get a similar feeling there as I do in Boston--it has an honest, lovable feel about it that just makes me feel at home right away. I actually forget that I was even there as a 13 year old, because it seems like that place I visited way back then was in a completely different universe than the city I see now. I guess it's all about your perspective.

Photo courtesy NCinDC via the Flickr Creative Commons