A brief tour of the past couple weeks: we have found, secured and moved into a pleasant
(four storey) home in Chevy Chase, DC (as opposd to Chevy Chase, Maryland, them're stange folk thar, or indeed, Chevy Chase the noted comic) and James has started school across the road at Lafayette. I have become tutored in the Way of Ikea*, and Gina has drafted memos to Robert Zoellick. We are still swimming upstream, but someone has thoughtfully untied our hands: we both have phones, we have superfast wireless at home, James has made some friends and Siena has a new local park, where I exchange online shopping tips with local moms. Strangely, or not when you consider that the automobile built this country with its riveted hands, and we are about five different bureaucracies away from a valid driver's licence yet, online is the only place to go. "Shoes? Nossir, you have to go all the way up Rockville Pike for shoes, and that's quite a ways." I duly went the other day in search of a winter coat for Siena to White Flint, an
edge city every bit as forbidding as it sounds, along, yes, Rockville Pike. Next door to the Metro station is the National Nucelar Regulatory Commission (with groups of worried-looking Japanese people in suits scuyrrying in and out) and that palce is a gingerbread cottage compared with the rest of White Flint, believe me. No coat for the Seabiscuit either. I lucked into that one, pictured above in Lafayette Park, at a crazy all you can eat before 2pm sale at Macy's, London Fog, $20 marked down from $75. I nearly picked up one for myself at that price.
*A martial art in the purest sense. Backbreaking, repetitive and the self must be subordinated to the Way if progress is to be achieved. Everything has its time and its place, and to attempt to change either of these is to howl in the face of the order of things. The knuckles become calloused, movements which have no apparent meaning or purpose must be endlessly repeated, agonising positions must be held on hard wooden floors for hours at a time, and yet when you are done, you have something of such logic, power and simple beauty that you could weep if you had tears left to cry.
