So long, and thanks for all the memories

Early on when I first moved to DC I discovered a watering-hole less than a block away from me that I quickly fell in love with. That place was the Townhouse Tavern, and it was the perfect dive bar - dimly lit interiors, a pool table with age-worn edges and scuffed felt, and not one but two jukeboxes chock full of classic rock and the odd Sinatra track. I began to frequent the establishment and became friends with the bartenders and waitstaff: Sarah, the struggling graduate student with that affected cynicism of intellectual endeavour, Yeta, the lesbian German waitress who looked like she never showered but was strangely hot anyway, Ed the David Carradine lookalike with all of the ponytail and none of the swagger, and many others. I grew to love the Townhouse because of its people and its proximity. Above all I grew to love the place because it was a great place to go to before starting the night, a great place to go to for the night, and a great place to go to wind the night down.

One night I was hanging out at the Townhouse with my friends Brooke and Chrissy, and Brooke's brother Tyler, who had lived in DC for the last 5 years. He was excited to be back at the Townhouse, and as he talked about the group of people who used to run the place and hang out there all those years ago - it was clear that had once had the same love that I had for the Townhouse and its people, what it stood for and what it meant. It was also clear that he didn't go there anymore. When I asked him why, he just smiled wanly at me and said, "Well, things change, you know?"

No, I didn't know, and looking back, it is clear that not only did I not know – but I also had absolutely no idea what he meant, until it started happening to me. Bit by bit, the Townhouse started changing. They repainted the interior walls. Yeta left to go back to Germany. Ed stopped working. Sarah took my mix CD out of the jukebox and then she, too, left. The clientele became a little preppier. The new bartenders were hip-hop fans and filled the jukeboxes accordingly. They replaced the old-school jukeboxes with those newfangled internet jukeboxes. Little by little, I began to enjoy the Townhouse a little less each time. I unconsciously decreased the frequency with which I went there, until I stopped going altogether. I missed it, sure, but a little less each day; until one day I walked by it and realised that I had not thought of it for months.

It is hard enough to make sense of this world we live in without having it, and its institutions, change on you every time you turn around. You want your local coffeeshop to always stay the same and serve the same great coffee and order their pastries from the same bakery, keep the same weathered old couches and the same scrawled menu on the blackboard. You want the New Yorker to keep writing in the same literary, yet engaging style, to keep its liberal bias, and to show up in your mailbox every Tuesday. We form habits. We create community. We choose the institutions we want to be part of, and we expect them to provide pillars of stability amidst the sham, the drudgery and the broken dreams of our world today. In a perverse way we almost expect the people around us to change and betray us, but we never expect the institutions we belong to, to change, to surprise, to betray us. Just because it is more likely than not, or just because we have so little control over it, doesn't make it any easier to accept. The delicious irony of the matter is that these institutions themselves exist solely through the grace of the people who run them, and so must change along with them.

I write this because I have now spent three years in DC, a city perhaps more transient than others, and one in which the bars, restaurants, even Houses of Parliament, change ever so often. Three years is a long time, long enough for these institutions to change, for my favourites to change. I still go to the Townhouse, for despite its changes it remains a charming place with an entirely different appeal altogether now. But I must now sadly say that I will no longer go back to a restaurant of which I have previously spoken fondly in these pages. Ever since Ann Cashion sold off Cashion’s Eat Place, it has just not been the same.