You can’t go home again. Home is where the heart is. Old sayings, yes, but they both ring true. Once you leave your home – y’know, the place you grew up in with the people you grew up with – it’s not there anymore. But if you’re always wanting to be somewhere else, you’re never really home either. Which, makes the trip we had been on kind of interesting.
As my wife said, we had been on the road for vacation. Well, I was on vacation in MD while she was at BlogHer in NYC. It has been a few years since I spent any significant amount of time in MD, since most years we prefer to go to the beach. Suffice it to say, this year was different. And it was different for several reasons.
One of the biggest reasons this trip was so different was a place that, while being an institution in its own right, was a place I had never been to before: Politics and Prose bookstore. It’s on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest DC, nestled between the Chevy Chase and North Cleveland Park neighborhoods.
The store underwent a change of ownership in the past year, and I thought this snippet that the new owners wrote at the time of the sale was rather poignant:
Indeed, as with many of the best independent stores in the country, Politics and Prose thrives first and foremost because of a deep connection to community. Our business is not just selling books but building community. A book can be bought anywhere; community can’t be. P&P’s special ethos must be nurtured and preserved with care, and we’re committed to doing so. But we also will be counting on our loyal customers—and hopefully many new ones—to help sustain the important institution that P&P has become.
I think they hit the nail on the head. Vibrancy at the local community level is what we’re talking about here. In this day and age of digitized media, it’s too easy for folks to engage others with, as my wife calls it, “keyboard courage.” Personally I think you can take the “cou” out of “courage” and you get a more apt description for what our discourse has become too often. There really isn’t a lot of community when you’re hurling f-bombs at someone halfway across the world. Try doing that to someone three doors down from you and see how long the two of you can live with the tension. The dynamic changes a lot.
But as people and communities try to put things back together after we realized our houses weren’t worth what we thought and true happiness isn’t measured in the number of “Likes” attached to a Facebook status, we have to start somewhere, with something. If we’ve learned anything over the past five years, the old suburban/ex-urban model of living just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We’re at a crossroads, this country of ours. We can either try to recapture what was once lost, or build something new.
It’s just that in this case, that something new is actually something that’s really old: the antiquated notion that neighborhoods are places you actually live and possibly work in, not just places you commute to and from. Or in Politics and Prose’s case, you go to a bookstore to read, discuss and buy books. Stated simply, this ain’t shopping.
Shopping is what you do when you’re looking for a new HD TV. But for books, for reading? I’d think you’d want to take a bit more care there, since you’re talking about true content that you will feed your brain with, not just picking out a device to watch it on. And this is a place where you can do that, especially since using mobile phones in the store is prohibited. An oasis from the modern world of ‘busyness,’ in the heart of one of the busiest cities in the world? Whodathunkit?
As for going home again, no a trip down Connecticut Avenue wasn’t enough to make me wish I was back in DC/MD again. It’s going to take at least a few more trips to Politics and Prose to do that.