CASUAL

...Senior officials from the Bureau of Land Management...

...Robert Lowell once composed a brutal poem exposing the weakness of his naval-officer father...

...Washington belongs to them...

...But meanwhile, they've taken so quickly to their jobs, and these are such exciting times to work in their field, it would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to get something done...

...Third assistant undersecretaries whose lives were full with the crisis in the Belgian Congo, the border squabbles in Macedonia, the succession in Siam...

...And if you listen long enough, sitting with them on a bench to feed the birds, they will inevitably come to it...

...Petersburg drew the bright young men in from the provinces and used them up as postal inspectors and superintendents of highway funds and analysts of foreign wars, as reporters and aides-de-camp and secretaries to the Board of Trade, as parliamentary assistants and fiscal administrators and military-procurement officers...

...They walk in the warm afternoons down along the canal or stand inside the Lincoln Memorial, reading the speeches on the walls...

...J. BOTTUM...

...Speechwriters washed into town by the Republican tide of 1952 and left stranded...

...But what else have the old to do besides remember what they've done...

...They plan to stay in town for only a few years, the husband told me as he proudly swept the brick sidewalk beside his first-purchased house...

...But the drama seems smaller here, somehow...

...Last month, the tiny wooden house around the corner was bought by a married couple, a pair of environmental lawyers...

...Back in the days before she hardened herself out of poetry and into ideology, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem called "The Diamond Cutters...

...For a while in my twenties, I kept a pair of lines from the poem stuck with a magnet to the fridge— advice for those, like diamond cutters, who have important work to perform on objects that when they are finished must leave their hands: Love only what you do / And not what you have done...

...In 1948, Thomas Dewey named them to his high-flying advance team...

...family and social life thinner in Washington—the only great political capital not also its nation's cultural or economic center...

...In Washington, they have memories of when they were young and great things seemed to want only to be accomplished...

...And the most brutal lines come at the end, when the poet taunts: And once / nineteen, the youngest ensign in his class, / he was "the old man" of a gunboat on the Yangtze...

...In 1972, they were junior members of a disarmament delegation...

...Consolidated-school-district lobbyists...

...Perched on a bench among the leaves, he shoos away the pigeons so the nervous sparrows and chickadees get their share...

...Old men dress in layers, cotton shirts beneath wool sweaters beneath tweed jackets, and his collar is frayed, not from poverty but because shopping is exhausting for a man his age, and why should he buy new clothes now...

...Paris, London, St...

...They're charming, ambitious, and terribly young...

...Every one of them was someone, once—a name to do at least a little conjuring with, a source for reporters needing background information on the way that people are thinking, over at Justice, or the direction the powers-that-be are leaning, over at State...

...Consular officers brought back from overseas to end their careers in an unfamiliar and unfriendly city...

...In other cities, they have extended families and settled places...

...I spot him sometimes on Sundays standing on the portico outside Holy Trinity, leaning his white head toward the other white heads, smiling with the other old men at some reminiscence of times only they now remember...

...Foolish...

...On the edge of Georgetown, in one of the playgrounds carved out of Rock Creek Park, my neighbor sits most October afternoons and spreads breadcrumbs for the birds...

...In 1961, Orville Freeman picked them to investigate new irrigation techniques...

...Retired reporters for papers long defunct...

...Perhaps it was always this way in great capitals...

...Beneath the young translucence old faces sometimes gain, you can see the bones of the ecstatic college boy who spent his good war with Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS, the seersucker-suited thirty-year-old at the State Department, the middle-aged chargé d'affaires...

...But Lowell also marks the truth that there is often in old men—especially those who brushed on history—the memory of a moment when promise seemed most likely to be fulfilled, a time when the work at hand was all and the man was nothing...