Casual

...We gawkers were kept out of the studio, despite our best efforts, but the entrance was up a few steps, and we could look through the crack under the door...

...CLAUDIA ANDERSON...

...Silent...

...I guess he must have been pretty tired when he got home to his squishy carpet and sodden bed...

...Stef lost the election, but I don't think she minded...

...Leaning over toward me and indicating two men at a nearby table, my husband said quietly, "Who do you suppose that is with Lindsey Graham...

...But the key couldn't be found, and Mother—casual in the unaccustomed role of landlord—soon forgot about it...

...Somehow when the congressman got home from his district a day or two later, it fell to me to answer the door...

...It's true, we live near some congressional office buildings (you should see our dry cleaner's "power wall" of signed pictures from the likes of George Mitchell and Mary Lan-drieu and Bob Dole...

...When I was in the eighth grade at the school across the street from our house in Arlington, my best friend was a girl who had moved to Virginia from Texas because her father was an aide to the vice president...

...Not reproachful—not at all...

...A nice crack about a farmer stinking of dung and peanuts brought down the house...

...But these things don't happen only in select locations in the city...

...My friend had actually been to the inaugural ball...

...I was treating an out of town visitor to a show at the National—.Anna Christie, with Liv Ullmann...

...Just as the royal couple passed, the handsome new president had looked up and waved...

...He moved out soon after that, though he didn't leave the city...

...One ill-fated day, a radiator sprang a leak and flooded my mother's new dining room...

...In the course of getting the mess cleaned up and the repairman in, someone said it would be worth checking the apartment below...

...Washington has watched his hair and mustache slowly turn snow white...

...So near and yet so far...

...Of course I'd already seen the exquisite Jackie in the flesh—admittedly, from a distance—at the inaugural parade...

...She had a brother named Lyndon, and she and her sister used to go to unbelievably glamorous-sounding parties with Capitol pages and sometimes even the Johnson girls...

...When I think of the last time I saw him, I can only cringe...

...We all got a charge out of the fact that the bald neighbor with the Ipana smile who used to jog around the Williamsburg Junior High field early every morning had suddenly been catapulted to global fame...

...Jen used to regale me with her doings, of which I've retained only the names of her three children—Shannon, Shiloh, and Shenandoah—and the impressive fact that when she married her much younger second husband in my sister's back yard in Great Falls (bucolic before the coming of the McMansions), she made a grand entrance bareback on a white horse...

...Judging by his politics, he's unlikely to see these words, but should they happen to fall under his gaze, I want him to know that I remain to this day mortified at the boorish welcome we gave him to our town...

...It's also probably the year I saw the soles of Jackie Kennedy's shoes...

...and, yes, that was Sandra Day O'Connor I noticed a while back picking up some odds and ends at the corner store...

...Apparently word that the president and first lady were in the audience made its way backstage in time for someone to customize the script...

...This was no ordinary cleaning woman...

...Kennedy's inaugural outfit— that muff!—the gesture had me and Stef swooning...

...Her first tenant was a freshman member of Congress whose family had stayed behind in California...

...The first lady had come to my ballet school to bring little Caroline to her first class...

...The Carters themselves I once bumped into at the theater...

...My family had watched it from a friend's fifth floor law office on then-shabby Pennsylvania Avenue...

...I grew up in the suburbs, amid constant reminders that this is a company town...

...He's still in Congress, in fact, all these years later...

...During the Carter years, another sister, Jen, shared a cleaning woman with the Brzezinskis...

...But not all my Washington moments are ones I look back on with pleasure—quite the opposite in one case...

...Along with the unutterable elegance of Mrs...

...After my father died, my mother bought a house in the city that had an apartment in the basement...

...I'll never forget him standing there with his arms folded across his chest...

...That was the year my sister ran for president of the ninth grade against a girl named Lyn Glenn mere months after Lyn's father had become the first American to orbit the earth...