Remembering Wonder, D.C. Style

It amazes me what we take for granted.
I went to the campus of my alma mater on Saturday. To say it was different would be an understatement. Trees that hadn’t even been planted when I lived on campus are reaching toward the sky, demonstrating they will be good breakers to the bitter winds that blow across the Blue Ridge in the winter. There are new signs, new pathways. Even the once-familiar bank of Lake Bob, where I used to sit and play my flute periodically (as if everyone wanted to hear), has clearly undergone changes: a structure for landscape equipment, more trees. The water tower that had looked so silly and obstructive when first erected (sometime during my first semester, I believe) is nearly unnoticeable from campus, for trees have grown right up around it.
The once-familiar buildings are still laid out as I remember them, but as I walk through the passageways and staircases, they all seem like memories from a dream. And it amazes me that this place used to be my life, that there was a time when I couldn’t imagine my routine going beyond walking distance of this small Virginia hamlet.
I wonder if, twenty years from now, I will come to the Capitol with my family and have the same feeling. If I will remember the route I’ve discovered that can get me from my office to Union Station in 15 minutes flat using primarily the Capitol tunnel system. I remember that painting, that quotation over the door. But they moved those statues from the old House Chamber, the Hall. The divot in the star in the center of the Crypt is deeper, for having millions more swipe their feet across it in two decades’ time.
I guess I remembered where it is that I work today, when I was in the basement of the Russell building with the cast of the statue Liberty that sits atop the Capitol dome. Nineteen-and-a-half feet tall, she is majestic, vigilant. She’s been there longer than anyone who has been elected to come here, or has worked here, and will be here long after we’re all gone, deo volente.
On the Senate side of the Capitol, the tiled floors and lamplight that nearly borders on romantic catches my eye. There’s a room to one side, the anterior of a Foreign Relations room I believe, that I step into for a moment just to look. By Hill standards it is an ornate room, with striking chandeliers, and in a glance out the window you see the Mall roll out like a carpet.
And I walk through the considerably more boring corridors of Rayburn, then home to Longworth. A far cry from what anyone could reasonably call ascetically pleasing, it is nevertheless familiar and elicits a sigh from my only half-conscious self as I walk. And I think to myself, I want to remember this.
Ashley would call it remembering wonder. Whatever it is, it helps overcome the doldrums of a day mired in paperwork and phone calls when I feel like I should be writing the next piece of landmark legislation. D.C. got along fine without me for hundreds of years, and it is not liable to miss me when I'm gone. All I can do is the next right thing... and take in the atmosphere while I have it at my fingertips.