where the heart is

Yesterday, I worked serving champagne and chocolates on a moonlit tour of Washington, D.C., which took place mainly on three large tour buses. I was listening to the very old tour guide recite the names of the museums as we drove by, thinking about how slaves built the Capitol and the White House, thinking about how different northwest is from southeast and Shaw from Dupont Circle, etc., and what kind of "tour" of DC these older white folks were getting, and I realized that at the end of the day I'm always going to reluctantly love DC, with all its idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies and absurd segregations and tame nightlife.

I also think that Maryland will always feel like home. If not the manicured suburbs and ridiculously competitive schools, at least the word, the name, knowing I'm in Maryland. I guess I have bought into this myth of home, that hearing about the Chesapeake and seeing the Maryland flag and looking for black eyed susans has rubbed off on me. And why shouldn't it? I think often immigrants and the children and even the grandchildren of immigrants don't get involved in local politics partly because they haven't seen themselves in the story of the place they live. Why should we take charge of something that we have never been a part of, and that often tokenizes minority participation and fundamentally silences alternate histories? But listen, even if I'm not a waterman living on an island, making my living off crabs and poling through small rivers, I still live in Maryland, and what I do is part of the life of Maryland, too. (Does re-writing a national/state story become part of writing it?)

Unless I get this job in Atlanta, and then perhaps I'll have to re-orient myself to Southern culture? Oh dear.