Anger Returns

A week ago, I was relaxing at my uncle’s rectory in upstate New York, waiting for the Christmas Eve snow to fall and watching holiday movies. I was coming off a four-week fiction residency in Johnson, Vermont, where there are no stoplights but drivers stop to let you cross the street, where an exciting evening involved sharing a good bottle of wine and talking until the wee hours in the dining hall, and where the coffee shop owner doesn’t mind if you sit on the couches for hours, alternating between reading and looking out the window.

My trip home started in Plattsburgh, New York, at 12:43 p.m. on Christmas Day, as I climbed on the train and began riding back toward D.C. It was a beautiful ride at first, with Lake Champlain to my left, small white birds wheeling and diving against the midnight blue waters, and with sparkling snow dust blowing back along the train’s windows as we rocketed down the track. The ride remained beautiful almost until New York City, where, even into the dark night, we could see the beginnings of Northeast Corridor industrialization: junked car lots, tall buildings, hundreds of billboards. The idyllic part of the trip behind me, I buried myself in my book and tried to deny that I had to be at work in the morning.

It was amazing how quickly I went from my relaxed attitude fostered up north to a complete resurgence of D.C. anger. Right out of the box, I missed my bus to work on the 26th. I heard it roar by, four minutes early, as I was gathering my purse and coat and heading out the door of my apartment.

There were few people out and about at work on Wednesday, but by Thursday things were getting back to normal. I drove to work that day because I had to go to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. Traffic was lighter than usual, but that meant people had more speed at which to make dangerous swerves through the traffic across the 14th Street Bridge into town.

My doctor is a popular one, and the waiting room was packed with people waiting to see her. The nurse kept coming out and asking patients if they’d be willing to see one of the other doctors in the practice, just this once, because my doctor was so backed up. I used the extra time to take a cat nap in my chair, but in between dozing, I could feel the blood pressure around me rising as people watched the clock eat away at their busy schedules.

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