I had known it was coming since I was in high school, but nevertheless when they really started ripping down Ballston Common Mall, in the neighborhood of my home county of Arlington, Virginia, the reality that the county had changed from the one I had spent the past eighteen years of my life had become something that I didn’t quite recognize. After spending a year at William & Mary, some two hundred miles to the south, I had lost track of the town I had the fortune of growing up in.
I won’t belabor the nature of the place as I feel I have done so a great many times in my other writings about the place, but for those unaware Arlington is a Beltway suburb (as we call them around these parts) of Washington, D.C., inside the very loop-shaped highway that surrounds that titanic city (in stature if not size).
It really began when I had noticed that my parents had gotten rid of the playset that I had used as a child, and my sister when she was that age, and all my younger cousins when they visited, in the back yard. That playset was in part why my parents had bought this particular house; so that they could ensure that my one-year-old-self could be amused easily enough. For those years it worked, and then it languished, with the wood rotting and the toy backhoe I had played with’s paint going from bright construction yellow to a more subdued shade, closer to white than anything else.
And then my father and I went to see Doctor Strange at the Ballston Mall cinema, among the few things from that mall still operational as it is rebuilt into an open air structure. It was unnerving; there were no big open spaces looking down to the food court fountains but rather the frighteningly sterile corridors that guided us from the elevators to the theatres. It looked like some sort of bizarre laboratory where we were the lab rats, awaiting a malicious experimenter to do what he would.
Gone was the Noodles and Company I ate at after school. Gone was the food court I had visited when walking home. Gone was the arcade that I played air hockey with my father. Gone was the comedy club I saw every time I went to the movies, and gone were the kiosks that were familiar only due to their omnipresence and endurance (clearly they must have made some sort of money). As much as my classmates preferred the further-off Tysons Corner, Ballston was where so many of us went after classes and clubs were over.
Yes, there were new stores in the strip mall in nearby Falls Church, or another had been torn down on Leesburg Pike, but Ballston was where I had spent so much time growing up; it was familiar. Seeing it torn down was bizarre, and reminded me that my future certainly would not be in the Arlington of the 2000s. My career will likely take me back to this little pearl on the Potomac but it will look ever more different, as the times march inexorably on.