Reston

I wanted to talk to Katherine on the phone but it was late and I couldn’t reach her. I didn’t want to talk in my parents’ house, where I was visiting for Thanksgiving, so I grabbed my phone, got into my mom’s car and drove. I drove to the south side of Reston, which is the older side, or at least the side on which fewer new development is occurring. It is also the older side of Reston as far as my own life history is concerned. I grew up on this side of the Dulles Access road, in a neighborhood called Boston Ridge, in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac.

I crossed the Access road and turned left on Sunrise Valley Drive and as I approached Boston Ridge, I decided to turn in. It was dark. There aren’t that many streetlights in Reston. Boston Ridge was built in the late 1970s in the middle of old forest and the place is still thick with trees. It was late November and the road was strewn with dead leaves which clumped in piles in the gutters where cars had scattered them.

I pulled up in front of our house, which, of course seemed small to me now. I sat there and looked at it for probably less than three minutes, enough time to notice the same brass pineapple doorknocker which I remembered from childhood, which I remember using occasionally but mainly when hoisted to its height in the arms of my mom or dad. We moved out of this house when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I think at some point I had been back to this neighborhood since then, but I don’t remember it.

I pulled out of the parking space and spent a few minutes looking around, seeking with the headlights of the car a playground which had been, as I recalled it, hidden in the woods nearby. I could not find it. The trees were thicker than I remembered but everything else was diminished. The hills and rises—the gradient of the land—which seemed so troublesome to a kid on a bike now seemed insignificant.

I didn’t feel any sadness or nostalgia indulging in this sudden trip down memory lane. Perhaps it was the darkness. Boston Ridge was familiar to me in sunlight; when you’re a kid you don’t go out after dark. Viewed through the headlights of my mom's Volvo, the neighborhood looked familiar but in a somewhat generic way. Piles of leaves and bare trees, moreover, are intrinsically nostalgic anyway. Winter is just evocative for some reason; perhaps it's the attendant notion of death.

I drove on to the Langston Hughes Middle School where I went for seventh and eighth grades, and South Lakes High School, where I went for ninth and tenth before I convinced my parents—through unabashed pleading—to transfer me to Interlochen and thereby save my soul.

Or whatever. I did feel something as I sat in the parking lot in front of South Lakes and it was a profound sense of regret. What a privilege it is to be young, I thought, and relatively innocent. But I spent much of that youth being unduly hard on myself and on those around me. I was always looking for the next thing, the thing that I did not have, as though unattainability was itself a virtue. I’ve never been one to linger and I didn’t linger that night. The school is currently undergoing a major renovation and there were trailers and construction equipment everywhere. But I didn’t stop to look around. I didn’t even get out of the car.

Is This Home?

Well, it’s happened at last. I am blogging tired. What is blogging tired? Well, it’s kind of like blogging drunk only a yard more irritable. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

What did I do today to make me so tired, you ask? Well, first of all, I woke up in Virginia at five in the morning, which, as my internal clock has now adjusted to Pacific Time, felt more like two in the morning. I was not exactly eager to face the day, let me tell you.

But face the day I did. My parents drove me to Dulles, bid me farewell, and after submitting to the TSA grunts (I inwardly commiserated with a particularly bewildered oldster who’d been pulled aside for a pat-down), I was in the terminal. I had about an hour, so I decided to get breakfast at the only place open, a bar & grill called (I think) Max’s. The eggs and potatoes were fine but the bacon was burnt to an unpalatable crisp. I was also given—and therefore charged for—an orange juice which I did not order, but after I drank it and enjoyed it, I decided not to make a fuss. Do you see how hard my life is?

We boarded the plane and it took off more or less on time. I watched as the cars, trees, and houses of northern Virginia receded into model scale. Soon we were above the clouds.

There was an annoying family seated across the aisle. They had brought a portable DVD player (who buys these crappy, useless devices?) and were watching Home Alone on full-blast without headphones. I complained about this to the stewardess but I don’t think she was entirely on my side, and instead of asking them to turn it off, she simply requested that they lower the volume. I bitterly read Maugham’s Of Human Bondage with my fingers stuffed in my ears.

We reached Colorado and the snowy Rockies which jutted out of the earth like white volcanoes. An hour later, the pilot pointed out the Grand Canyon which, thankfully, was below my side of the plane, so I had a clear view of it. “It’s so vast,” I thought. “It goes everywhere.”

A little before 11 am, we were descending over Greater LA, which looked bright and warm under all that sun. This is the only view of the freeways that makes them look grand, I told myself; from above. When we touched down, I closed my eyes, as I often do before a landing. Moments later, I was in the terminal, heading for Baggage Claim.

Happily, my bag was first out of the chute; the only time that’s ever happened to me. I headed out to the bus line to determine where I could catch a bus to Encino.

You cannot catch a bus to Encino. You can catch a bus to Westwood, from whence you can catch a bus to Sherman Oaks, from whence you can catch a bus to Encino. Once I’d figured this out, I determined that an hour and a half would be a long time to go without food, considering the last time I’d eaten was over seven hours ago. There was no food in the terminal I’d left, however, so I had to drag my bag several terminals down, where I managed to snag a vanilla milkshake.

About an hour later I was in Westwood, where I had a good deal of trouble tracking down the next bus I was to take. Eventually I found it and soon I was on my way. As we made our way over the Santa Monica Mountains, I began to muse on the irony that it was taking me almost a third as much time to get from LAX to the Valley as it had taken me to get to LAX from Virginia. I decided not to dwell on this. Soon I would be home, where I could have something to eat and take a nice afternoon nap.

Sadly, it was not to be. When I arrived, around 2:30 in the afternoon, my house had a guest who I had not been anticipating, and he was sitting on the living room couch, thoroughly engrossed in a full-volume screening of Bruce Almighty on the flat-screen television that dominates the wall adjacent to my bedroom.

“Do you want me to turn it down?” he asked me.

Rather than responding truthfully and thereby risk getting into an extended conversation about it, I said, “No, I’ll just be leaving.”

Which is what I did. And so I’m here. At the Coffee Fix, my home-away-from-home on Moorpark in Studio City. And now I truly am exhausted. I think I’ll finish this mustardy sandwich I have before me and by the time I’m done, perhaps sleep will be prepared to do its worst: overcome even the most vociferous of screwball comedies screaming from the next room. If I can sleep through that, I know I’m set.