Well, actually I started coming back to my office in early April, but I thought today would be as good a time as any to write about the experience:
A vignette: I take the elevator down to the lobby and walk over the the bookstore to browse the nearly empty shelves. The proprietor (who I’ve been acquainted with for several years) is so glad to see a human customer, that he follows up his greeting with a long conversation about how strange it is to be opening up again. I purchase some pencils and a notebook and head back through the nearly empty building to edit a manuscript.
Washington DC is slowly coming back to life. Individuals (including myself) are tentative and the mask is always close at hand, a totem of our recent year+. As in some anthropomorphic form of pathetic fallacy, outside my office window, I get to watch as the old department store is demolished by machines the size of Godzilla. It’s impossible not to think that we are watching an old era end and something altogether new begin.
Oddly enough, the sound of the machines helps the focus on the manuscript–which is about the history of the relationship between the NSF and the National Science Board, created in the same act of Congress in 1950. Stay tuned.
Discoverers and Discoveries 