It has been about ten years since I’ve been back to the city of constellations, that immovable bit of engraved clockwork on the land. Beside the fact that four meridians still dice the city anchored by its marble and granite triumverate, much has changed. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say the city bustles when it once slept, it magnetically draws where it once repulsed. The city throbs.

Why then does it feel empty, a bit callow even?

There are pockets where it sweats, there something other than tongue-licking sparkle opens inviting shadows and hot thoughts to slither through the cracks. But you have to look pretty hard. This is still deal city. The claim attracts, not the chase. Shortcut Charley. Its a passed buck and longevity kind of place, maybe not then one you’d come to get lost in.

I’m intrigued. For example, its become more bike friendly; there are more commuting pedalos than delivery cyclists now. Where once dog walkers leashed their charges there are dog parks to keep them. Where I might have paid for a homeless paper today they’re handed out free. Its rare to see cars more than 10 years sleuthing low lamped streets. Where once there was a chopped up forest worth of books in the hands of metro riders there are dozens of people looking down, doing that ear-budded swipe and poke thing. Great food and drink abound on every corner I can’t see anyone who looks particularly happy about it.

Its entitlement city. It breads privilege.

I try to say thanks do the bus drivers when I get off at the front. Why, because its novel for this Vermonkin? Because I haven’t become inured to the idea that these are people not drones transacting the vital functions of our privileged day-to-day? I don’t know – I like to think that if I rode regularly and perhaps even knew these folks I’d tell a joke now and then to boot. Some people would still look away, as though I’ve caught them off guard and an eyelash on the tip of their nose.

I like the periphery the best, walking from Petworth to Columbia Heights, before the SportZone and the Target and the chain food stores and condos crammed between. I like the border neighborhoods where mix abounds, north Capitol and deeper Southwest. Don’t get me wrong, the center is where the action’s act. But you feint, retreat. Its transient. You can build a life in the border zones. The pace of emerges from the corner bodegas and steamed up hole-in-the-walls and the in-between returning cars and utility vans and stroller-pushing momma’s.

A few places haven’t changed.

Take Forest Hills, sort of upper-Northwesty. Its an area known as residential, once to well-knowns like Marjorie Merriweather Post, boasting today a justifiably popular bookstore, Politics and Prose. Along the stretch of Connecticut Avenue that heads toward Chevy Chase, Maryland just north of the Van Ness/University of the District of Columbia metro, is a stretch of apartments and homes and modest businesses that, remarkably, pass for an area unchanged since 2002. What’s within the apertures that punctuate these mid-century façades no doubt rotate with the sun but the atmosphere is rooted, nearly constant. Familiar.

As is the singularly boundless zeal of Adams Morgan and adjacent residential burrows like Kalorama Triangle and Mount Pleasant. These stalwartly youthful neighborhoods that maintain a tenuous diversity are also recognizable, with a few favorite haunts intact, a few lost, and the sad compromises of neighborhood intimacy for the chains like Starbucks and FedEx/Kinkos. But I shouldn’t judge, I am after all just a visitor passing through.

And passing through is everything in Washington.

Its my favorite city to walk in despite the obvious rise of travelers who otherwise prefer to drive. And the strain on public transport is clear. When once metros and buses could be counted on for packing on the rain days, today every line that I have traveled at 5:00 or 6:00 is to the door with passengers. I hear even that the curse of reverse has been arrested and today more people than ever live in the District. This makes me smile: it’ll be good for business and neighborhoods and the press and push of life.

In all that, I hope the city will keep to its pluralism of peoples and ways and destinies, that it’ll remain chocolate city with a persistent grace, maintain that distinctive architectural record of Federals and Georgians and Second Empire and its green spaces of retreat. That the hustle of the grifting border zones remains, along with that the chance encounter of the sounds of the Ellingtons and MacKay’s.

Its still a great place to be.