One week ago, I moved into Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that has quickly become the subject of significant change in Washington, DC. Of course, “significant change” is a euphemism for “gentrification,” which, of course, is a euphemism for “the local proliferation of gays, hipsters with giant glasses, and pretentious boutique shops that sell overpriced, impossibly tiny Tres Leches cupcakes that are popular, credible, and ethnic among gay hipsters from Indiana,” which, of course is a gross oversimplification of drastic demographic shifts. As a gay hipster, I will blame the state of Indiana.
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This week, I attended a class taught by my writing mentor — an incredible, comprehensive survey of literature and theory relating to rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of writing. As she handed out the syllabus and the class assignments of the week, I noticed an assignment that looked similar to one I had written as an undergraduate for this very professor. “Show not tell” was the premise to this piece of writing — “show” but not “tell” a scene of writing. Write about women scribbling on trains, children piercing cursive “A’s” on their newly sharpened pencils into loose leaf, love letters written with the ferocity of lust, fearlessness, and dire emotion. She explained the assignment and asked me — someone who had been sitting silently for the entirety of the class — to elaborate on the nature of the assignment. To my surprise, she had kept the piece I had crafted at nearly 2 AM, caffeinated in the library cubicle as a college sophomore — and used it as a piece of reading on the syllabus. It was entitled “Writing in Columbia Heights”.
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I found it buried in my e-mail after exhausting all the search terms I could think of. I had e-mailed it to myself at 3 AM on a January morning:
The aroma of golden brown, lightly basted marinated chicken easily fills the apartment, as do the sound of the blaring telenova in the living room and the anguished, high-pitched cries of the baby in the bedroom. She sits in the dining room, positioned in the center of the apartment at the intersection of the raucous sounds and ethnic smells. Her small frame, sun-kissed tan, wafer thin, and the size of someone two years her junior, sits atop a chair with tapestry that is a retro swirl of off-white, faint pink, and light teal. The chair contrasts with the other pieces of furniture in the apartment – the faded, worn in black leather couch, the grey faux marble entertainment center, and the seemingly random framed Star Wars poster. The décor is a mess of color, of decades, of styles.
The girl taps her blue mechanical pencil against the plastic sheet covered table with her right hand. She twirls her brown, tangled hair with her left hand’s index finger. Her feet, covered in mud-stained white sneakers, hover above the carpet because the legs they dangle from are not nearly long enough to touch the ground. But, that does not stop the feet from alternating taps to the air. Her forehead scrunches as she stares at the blank piece of paper consisting of a title: “Things That are Important to Me”. There is nothing else on the page. She lets out a sigh.
“This is too hard for me. I can’t think of nothing.” She says defeated.
Suddenly, the sound of overdramatic female voices from the telenova changes to a nasal voice attempting to sing a theme song. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongBob Square Pants! The girl immediately drops her pencil and turns her head like clockwork towards the television.
“Daires! Preste atención! Es necesario que escuche a tu tutor y haga tu tarea! Bueno para tu futuro…tu educación!” Yells her Mother from the kitchen.
The girl returns to the blank page, her eyes squinting at the piece of paper. She picks up her pencil with her right hand, tilts the piece of paper with her left, and slowly begins to write the words, “My family is important to me”. She looks at her tutor, her eyes twinkling from the sentence before her.
“That’s beautiful.” Says the tutor
The girl gives a sigh of relief and begins to slowly write the next sentence.
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The girl is the aforementioned piece is Daires, an elementary school student and avid learner that I tutored in an apartment mere blocks from the house in which I currently reside. We talked softball, read the Wayside Story series, and wrote about “her country” — not the United States, but the Dominican Republic. This was before the Target, the Staples, the Washington Sports Club and the fancy cupcake shops were fully erected in Columbia Heights. This was before people — people like me — began to settle in the spaces once rented by the residents of this enclave: Central American refugees cultivating the District as their home.
Today, I am, yet again, composing a scene of writing under very different circumstances in Columbia Heights. I am living the narrative, but wondering if the one I had written only six years ago is true. I am still, but not quite, “Writing in Columbia Heights” with questions of my impact both positive and overtly negative. Here I am — a residential wanderer who is not lost, but may have helped create lost communities along the way.