Monday it was sunny, but cool, with a pleasant breeze. I grabbed my camera and walked south on 10th. At F, I remembered a recent post Reya had made, and so I jutted over to 8th to take a quick peek at the street painting there. Then I walked by the Navy Memorial, where some elementary school kids were giving a performance of music and dance. I grabbed a sandwich at the FBI Cosi and headed across Pennsylvania, over to 12th and down past the IRS building, across Constitution, to the Mall, where I claimed a park bench just east of the 12th street tunnel. I ate my Ginger Chicken on whole grain and took some pictures and thought about "place" and how it's supposed to be not where, but who you're with that really matters. How for the most part that's true. But sometimes. Sometimes where you are makes all the difference. And it's kind of an inscrutable thing, the sense of connection you can feel with a place. It's not something you can easily point to, and it doesn't always make sense. It's not necessarily a factor of time spent, or nativity, though it could be. It's something about the air in a place - the way it touches your senses. The way it feels.

As I ate, people walked past, and I listened to the strange temporal quality of their footsteps. The way they suddenly came into my aural bubble, and just as suddenly vanished. One moment they were there, in front of me, belonging to that person. These feet on gravel. The next minute they were gone, along with the person who brought them. These footsteps. Now quiet.

A girl stepped up to where I was sitting. She introduced herself and said she was from WAMU, the local NPR station. She asked if I would mind speaking into her digital recorder the answer to two questions: 1) my name and 2) what it means to me to be an American. And I said sure, because why not? Even though I had no real clue what the hell I was going to say. I mean, I knew my name, which was a start. But I had no idea how to respond to the America thing. And the truth is that there was no real answer for that question. It was just one of those fluff questions that people ask on TV or radio shows and it doesn't have any real significance. In order to provide me with a visual cue, she had written the questions in ALL CAPS on a folded piece of lined paper. She handed it to me. I joked about the pressure. "Just use the paper," she said. "But the paper doesn't have the answers," I felt like saying.

Then she pressed a button and I spoke my name into the mic and, after a couple of nervous tongue and teeth clicking noises, which were painfully loud and clear to me, I said that . . . "well, I was sitting here on the Mall in DC on a sunny, but cool afternoon, eating a sandwich I'd bought at Cosi, thinking about this place, and I guess it was that. That was what it meant to me to be an American: the ability to do this thing I was doing, which I didn't do nearly enough, and which I suddenly felt I should have done much more while I lived a twenty-minute walk away, instead of taking this place for granted every day, eating lunch in my apartment alone, using the excuse of not enough time or two much work. And damn, I regret that. And do you ever feel like you're not living life, you know, correctly? Like maybe you're worrying about the wrong things?"

That's what I said. Or something like it. Okay, maybe not those last couple of things about regret and worry. But I was thinking them. Whatever I said, I'm a little embarrassed now to think about it because, well, it didn't get to the heart of the matter. It was fluff. A fluff reply for a fluff question. Oh well, I guess I was feeling fluffy. And who knows, she might have been in the mood for fluff. And my fluff response might be on Metro Connections on NPR around July 4th. Fluff, immortalized. For the sake of radio everywhere, let's hope not.

The girl smiled politely, thanked me and, as we engaged in some small talk, she packed up her recorder and cue card. Then we exchanged farewells and she walked on to the next populated bench. And her footsteps disappeared, just like the others. And before long, I began to question whether or not she and I had even interacted. And as I sat there under the shade of a tree branch, alone, with my camera in my lap, my balled up sandwich bag and bottle of water next to me, looking off toward the Capitol, I felt a little like crying. Because place is never permanent, and sometimes that feels tragic. Because of the lonely temporal quality of, not just footsteps, but just about everything.

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