I returned to Echo Park from Washington, DC, on Wednesday, feeling thankful to have had a good Thanksgiving dinner with my family, thankful I didn't kill a deer, thankful that the places where I most want to be are the ones where I am invited (it has not always been the case).

It seemed fitting that the biggest news in DC (until Obama announced the 30,000 troops) was the gatecrashers at the White House. They were front page on the Washington Post for at least three days in a row. It's hardly the first time a White House function has been crashed, according to the Post. But it is the first time it has been such big news. Not coincidental to the dimensions of the Salahis story, the open city where I grew up has turned into a warren shaped by all kinds of gates -- the new architecture of the city put the architecture in place for this kind of story. All around the Capitol - and other places - there are now cement blocks, the little walls, I call them, and underground there are barriers that pop up, blocking the street in an instant. As a kid, I rode a public bus that used to pull up directly in front of the White House, where a swarm of office workers would pile in, the change they dropped into the box clinking in an oddly riveting irregular rhythm, while I looked sullenly through the bus windows at the silly looking White House guards, sometimes wondering if it were true - as we were told as children - that if a child pulled out a toy gun at this place, those same dandy-looking guards were under orders to shoot. Now that same section of Pennsylvania Avenue is closed to public traffic. No more yawning at the White House up close. Now we gape when a pair of uninviteds get close and then...get in...only to be thrown out again and again after they have gone home and told the world where they'd been.

On Sunday I had my own incident with a little wall - out on a newly expanded section of highway in Maryland.

I had gone to visit my mother's grave. As always, I was awed and horrified (as most likely everyone is) by how close her body was to mine - how thin the little wall between us - and how infinitely far away she really was. I considered the new company she kept. There was a woman who had died at 105. There was a two-year-old who was born after my mother's death. There was a 17-year-old-girl, who had died four years earlier but whose grave still had temporary tape with her name and dates; the stone had not been carved.

It was a beautiful day to be at the partly wooded cemetery. But I couldn't decide when to leave. Twice I headed for the car, and twice I surprised myself by stopping in my tracks and turning back. After a while, the right moment came around, and I left. I took a pair of two-lane roads to the big highway. On the I-270 onramp, I started the mental transition that the change in speed and the sense of urgency in a four-lane, fast moving road brings, the call of the present I call it. But before I could fully get to that new place, a deer with antlers jumped over the new cement barrier on the right shoulder, started to run straight across the road, then changed course and ran directly at my car before turning again. I hit the brakes and swerved. Another car did the same, somehow managing not to hit my car. The deer made it to the center divider. Then it jumped over that and faced the odds as it ran with its legs at full extension, like a racehorse, across four lanes of traffic on the other side, succeeding. It jumped over the little cement wall, a third wall, on the far side of the road and disappeared into the woods. A gatecrasher, whose prize was survival.

Monday: Despite all of the gloss that has shined up Washington in the past two decades, it's still provincial. On Monday night, while the Senate was debating health care, I went to a Capitol Hill restaurant called Sonoma. I went there partly because it was housed in the same location as a long-lived bistro/tavern that used to be called Jenkins Hill, which is the former name of Capitol Hill. I remember borrowing change to play the Doors' "Light My Fire" on the jukebox when I was a kid. The place is now redone in DWR/Pottery Barn modern beiges - with a California wine list and industrial style aluminum chairs that don't have a lot to say to the beige. It was only about a quarter full, with the same kind of crowd Jenkins Hill once drew - some people from the neighborhood, a couple of office groups, a couple of Capitol Hill tweedy types, maybe from the Library of Congress, which is across the street, a couple of dates. My salad was Boston bib lettuce with chocolate poured on it and a lot of rock salt, and smoked figs, (the figs were good). A side order was smoked chard. My penne had smoked onions and garbanzo beans. It seemed like a harmless parody of California cuisine - What with all the fires, I guess they like their food smoked! -- not that any of the other patrons cared. My husband shrugged (he liked his dinner) and said they were simply trying to have it both ways. Sitting on both sides of the fence, when I wanted them to pick sides.