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Thursday, December 16, 2004
ING
It’s just UD and a sleeping construction worker this morning at the little red tables in Penn Place, her town’s one commercial building (she’s waiting for the 8:40 train to Union Station.) The town post office is here (residents have successfully fought home delivery for decades), as is the town archive, the town administrator, the town restaurant, and the town therapist. The amount of activity around this just-renovated and enlarged building (delivery vans, street stripers, pickups with cherry trees in the back) reminds UD of the vocal minority of townspeople who were opposed to this change. One of them, on the day the Town Council passed a motion to go ahead with it, taped a piece of cardboard up in the old post office lobby on which he’d written, in morbid calligraphy, IF YOU HAVE TEARS, PREPARE TO SHED THEM NOW (Shakespeare). One can swing this sort of small town data Barbara Pym’s way, grinning at its absurdity, but UD is disinclined. There was a slightly thready privacy about life here once, now replaced by a natty something which has us closer to quaint fakes like Middleburg and Burlington than we’d like. UD is heading into DC (she’s now on the MARC train) to give the first of her two final examinations - this one on Don DeLillo, who writes about precisely this sort of American success story, the series of events by which a real place becomes a concept. UD has now transferred from the MARC to the Metro. Her ride is free, courtesy, as the conductors keep announcing, of ING Direct, a new bank in town. How much would it cost, UD wonders, for her to do the same? “Your free ride today is courtesy of UNIVERSITY DIARIES, a blog about American university life…” |