DC in a Different Time
For something called Read + Roam, this blog has been awfully light on roaming lately.
And of course it’s obvious why. The COVID-19 pandemic rages on. It’s a time of fury, unrest, and attempted coups. The world feels coated in a thick layer of strangeness and danger. I, meanwhile, am in the waning days of another pregnancy, padding lethargically around my apartment, quietly waiting for both the world at large and my own small world to change. I’m not going anywhere other than NYU Langone anytime soon.
As the urge to nest hits, I’ve been doing all the things people joke about pregnant women doing: plowing through to-do lists, packing and repacking my hospital bag, and folding tiny clothing in Kondo-esque arrangements. I’ve also, in a fit of before-time nostalgia, been reviewing and organizing all the photos I took back when Read + Roam was in large part a travel blog. Now, slotted neatly into folders, are thousands of photos of bookstores, libraries, and tourist attractions, all made jarring by a lack of masks and social distancing.
Of all the pictures, the ones I pored over longest were some I took in DC about a year and a half ago. I was in the city for work – one of my clients was a giant hotel chain that would later go on to furlough all its marketing staff and fire us, its ad agency, after all nonessential travel ground to a sudden halt. I visited in June 2019, and DC’s cherry-blossom-studded spring had already yielded to sticky summer weather. The city was alive with Pride preparations and twenty-something chinos-clad consultant-types zipping around on Bird and Lime scooters. I walked around Georgetown and Adams Morgan. I visited a bunch of bookstores – including Capitol Hill Books, the charmingly musty store now open by appointment only, and Kramerbooks and Afterwords, the Dupont Circle institution that has since been renovated and renamed Kramers. I queued for a long, sweaty hour to complete the paperwork needed to gain admission to the glorious (and now shuttered) Library of Congress. It all happened relatively recently, but none of it would be possible now. Both bookstores have changed, the Library of Congress’ 164 million items are no longer accessible to the public, and I’m different too. I look at the photos – students bent over long shared tables, people crowded around shelves of new releases, and me, maskless, in the bathroom of Capitol Hill Books – and feel the same way I do when I watch large crowd scenes in movies: disoriented and disbelieving. Sentimental for the unremarkable normalcy of popping into a bookstore between meetings. And, because it’s DC, unable to stop myself from drawing a comparison between these carefree photos and the city that recently came under siege and is now patrolled by the National Guard, parts of it bearing more resemblance to Hulu’s depiction of Gilead than to what I saw there.
What will it look like, I often wonder, when we travel again someday (don’t get me started on people who never stopped)? Will we run our fingers along the surfaces of old books again? Will we move with lightness, scooting and snapping and laughing in close proximity to each other? Or will these simple things become the relics of another age, living only in the fastidiously-organized folders of my Lightroom account?
Cross your fingers with me that it’s not the latter.
