flashback, part 69 of n

“When the smoke cleared, I was in a one-bedroom apartment facing right out on a main thoroughfare in the mid-Orange Line sector. I had no furniture – the cable was working and the TV was on the floor, and the telephone was working…but the Power Mac 6100 was sitting on top of a pizza box with a hole cut in it over where the fan intake rested. I had an inflatable mattress to sleep on, with my boom box at the head, and every morning at 7:30, I awoke to Z104, playing Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” regular as clockwork. We were still shirt-and-tie then four days a week, and I honestly don’t remember what I did with my shirts – hopefully I wasn’t coming to work too rumpled, because I sure don’t remember bringing an ironing board. I got up in the morning, walked down the main drag, turned to cut through the local mall, and down the road between towering condo and office buildings to the Ballston Metro station, catty-corner from The Nature Conservancy (a sharp reminder of the ex-girlfriend). And then on the weekends, an early Friday exit to allow me to beat the rush hour traffic on the Beltway as I headed back for the Pennsylvania Turnpike and back west, through rolling hills splashed with autumn color in a strange world of tollbooths and cornfields and bits and pieces of Colonial architecture…”

-August 23, 2009

Sprint Spectrum was the first PCS service in the country.  GSM-based, operating in Washington DC and Maryland (mostly) and the first step into the 1900Mhz band, all in November 1995. I’m sure that at the time, it seemed downright futuristic, and not just because of the built-in caller ID and voicemail and pager functionality. And I’d certainly never heard of them anywhere else in 1997 when it was time to start looking for cell phones – because of course I’d need to have a cell phone in DC.  Even if I couldn’t freakin’ afford it.

I’m reminded not only of that, but of walking by the Sprint Spectrum kiosk in Ballston Common Mall and seeing the new Washington Wizards gear in the sporting goods stores – that lower-case “dc” logo and all the blue and old-gold where once there had been the red-white-and-blue of the Bullets.  Because they were moving to the new MCI Center and changing their name, and because the owner had been a friend of Yitzhak Rabin and turned against the old name after the assassination.  But the thing that stuck out was – here is an NBA team. Call 301-NBA-DUNK for tickets. There’s an NBA franchise in my town now, something I’d never experienced – never mind the fact that I’d already been a Redskins fan for seven years or that there was pro hockey too. Local major league sports: completely new concept.

And transit, of course.  The Metro, the functional necessity of DC as much as air conditioning – no sane person would live there without it.  The story’s been told over and over by now of how I only realized the night before my first day of work that I didn’t have to change at Metro Center for Farragut North – I could get out at Farragut West and just walk the extra block. But then, I’d never lived anywhere with a viable public transit system before, and by that I mean one that could take me from the place I lived to places I actually wanted/needed to go.  Like work.  Like a four-level mall at Pentagon City.  Like the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute.

While I was ditching work after jury duty, I took the opportunity to watch the new Captain America movie, which is basically 80% set right between where I lived and where I worked in those first days in what’s now known as the DMV.  I was watching a guy who had a life somewhere else – somewhen else – who’d had it turned upside down and found himself living in Washington, trying to make sense of how his life had changed and who and what he was now.

It hit way too close to home.