North Maple Rag

Just typing that sentence makes me smile. First, it sounds like a line out of a movie and second, I love DC. I know I've written about DC before, but I feel compelled to again. I was asked during my practice interview last week about the biggest challenge I'd ever faced and I answered that the scariest thing I've ever done was moving to DC after college. It was also, however, hands down, the most exciting.

During an eighth grade trip to Washington, I had decided that that was where I wanted to live. At the age of 22, I landed at Dulles with two suitcases, a deposit on a dorm room for the summer, and 18 hours before my first "real" job was to start.

And for the next year, I was exactly where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. After that, I was applying to law school and thinking a lot about what was coming next in my life. That first year, though, was filled with a kind of right time, right place magic that I hope I find again, but expect I won't. I'm not saying I won't be that excited or happy again, just that I'm not that young anymore. In the words of Joan Didion, "one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before."

That's exactly how I felt and it's why I like going back to DC. I like to remember that time and that feeling. I get a little taste of it every time I take the escalator up from the Metro at Union Station and see the Senate Buildings in the distance, every time I sit with friends in a crowded restaurant or bar and every time I wander through Georgetown to my favorite hole-in-the-wall bookstore. So I'm off, ostensibly to attend the American Constitution Society's national conference, but really just to enjoy my home away from home.