Wednesday, 5/28/03: Unsettled

All the well-educated white people I know, who happen to make up the vast majority of the people I know, are extremely excited about the accelerating pace of change in beautiful downtown Silver Spring. The steel skeleton whose detailing will eventually make it a Borders seems to acquire a wall a week. The corner of Colesville and Georgia where four chain restaurants will soon open their doors bustles with hard-hatted workers and constructive rubble as well. Existing restaurants are bustling both at lunch and at dinner.

But it's not just the future that's exciting our imaginations. The complete cinematic menu presented by having both the jewel-like AFI Silver Theater and the beloved AMC City Place 10 on the same block of Colesville Road has proved tasty to almost everyone who's sampled it. Why, even well-educated white people I don't know seem excited. I used to field queries on where to find the union center on Second Avenue, a nearby place to buy liquor, or where to get some weed. But in the last month, I have variously directed people who seemed to fit the above socioethnic description to "someplace we can buy a bottle of wine," "a nice, cheap restaurant," "an ATM around here," and of course the AFI itself.

I was reminded of the circles I travel in when I traveled in one that has become unusual for me today. I used to take the J4 bus to and from work; it's a limited-stop route that goes from Bethesda through Chevy Chase to Silver Spring and then through Langley Park to College Park. Riding this bus from start to finish would show you pretty much the entire economic range of Maryland's suburbs.

I forsook the J4 for a quicker trip on the Metro proper, but I sometimes revisit it after work to go to the Flower Barbershop, which I've been going to for twelve years, and which was long known to me as the Vietnamese Barbershop after the origin of most of its barbers. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more multicultural clientele anywhere, though, and I've always felt comfortable there, with generally genial fellow haircutees and uniformly genial haircutters.

Anyway, I was reading a Cynthia Ozick book as the bus got up to University Boulevard and Piney Branch Road, and, a little lost in thought, said something to myself—I'm not even sure what, and it wasn't distinct. I looked up to see where we were and saw instead a middle-aged black woman staring daggers at me, her attention evidently taken from the catalog she had in her hands. My muttering had taken her attention, I assume, but her stare had a clear message: "Who the fuck are you? And why the fuck are you here?"

I looked her in the eye for a little bit to establish that I wasn't going to wilt, then looked around the bus. Other people were staring at me too, not with the venom of this woman but with dubious looks nonetheless. I was the only white person on the bus, and I was the only person in business-casual clothing on the bus. Both of these are true most times I ride the J4, but I felt them acutely for the minute or so this all was going on. I looked back at the woman, and she was still looking at me, with the same expression. I held her gaze for what I thought was long enough to reestablish my invulnerable presence, then turned back to my book.

As much as I felt like I knew what to do, the encounter still disturbed me a little, mostly because it was the first time in a long time I had been made to feel like an interloper by strangers. And it reminded me of what I eliptically referred to above: There are a lot of people in Silver Spring who cannot regard rent increases with my mild annoyance but have to scramble to see what to do, a lot of people who are worried that their businesses will be forced from their locations by rapidly increasing rents, a lot of people who could really give a damn about AFI and Borders and Panera Bread and all these other altars and emblems of the well-educated white person's existence. I don't know what I can do about it, and I don't know how I can give them a voice here, but I'm going to try not to forget them, even if some of the more ornery members of their ranks might want to make me a memory.

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