You know you come to the east coast and wonder why you ever left.  The effect wears off after a couple of days, and like Joni Mitchell you want to see the folks you dig, you want to kiss a Sunset pig, you want no rain and no humidity and you look forward to returning to California.  But until you’re reminded of the downsides, you’re enraptured.

Go to the outskirts of L.A. and you’ll find dirt.  A brown landscape which in many places could stand in for Iraq.  Sure, the ocean’s twenty blocks away.  And mountains far eclipsing anything on the eastern seaboard loom, providing recreational activities galore, but alas, even these towering edifices are brown and forbidding.  Whereas the east coast is baseball to George Carlin’s football.  Endlessly running green fields.  Emanating from the city center.  It smells like…home.

Not sure who drives those trams at Dulles.  I remember when the airport opened and there was hype about the new people-moving strategy, but the airport has been eclipsed by Denver and other newbies many times over.  Are there magnetic stripes in the ground or is there a human driver?  I forget.

And the weather…

There’s no humidity.  How surprising.  It’s about seventy.  Perfect.  It’s summer.  Kind of reminds me of those Junes of yore, after a school year, going to Cape Cod, indulging, relaxing.  Whereas we can indulge in L.A. all the time, so we don’t.  There’s a sense of possibility at this time of the year on the east coast.  After enduring the cold, you’re ready to cut loose.

The freeway is gentle and meandering as opposed to the endless concrete slab of the west coast.  And then, as we crossed the Potomac, I saw twentysomethings playing baseball in a field.  On the kind of crabgrass that’s illegal in California.  I never see baseball played in L.A. except in Dodger Stadium.  Here baseball is participatory, the way I remember it.

On my left was the Kennedy Center.  Which seems to have aged.

But to my right came the Jefferson Memorial.  Appearing as if it were built yesterday.  I remember my father driving us past in the sixties, us not getting out, having seen too many monuments and memorials already.  It hovers like a flying saucer in its own domain.  It radiates the intelligence of its namesake.

And then the limo made a right, into the entry plaza of the Mandarin Oriental.  And when I got out of the car and stood up, there, down the street, in the distance, was the White House.  Seems almost surreal having not been up close and personal in decades.  Like it’s not supposed to exist.  But someone lives there.  The guy the lawyer was bitching about in the tram.

I e-mailed an old friend about having dinner, but I never heard back from her.  I thought I’d saunter through town and grab a bite, but there’s nary an establishment in sight.  So I’ll sit here and stare out the window at the little marina, and the bridge akin to the one that plane crashed nearby decades ago.