bystanders
It began with a wispy gray cloud. The plume was interesting at first, noticeable but unthreatening in its quiet creep down Pennsylvania Avenue. A fire truck sped by, followed minutes later by another three.
“It’s Frager’s,” a Capitol Hill police officer shouted from across the street.
Suddenly the cloud morphed into a thick black tail of smoke. A few people left their patio tables with their cups of coffee and laptops and leaned over the avenue for a better look. It was growing.
I walked east on Pennsylvania Ave until I was as close as I could get. Gathering groups of bystanders shuffled to the median where the best vantage point was. Some had settled on the grass, legs extended, watching the dark plumes like fireworks on a July evening. On any ordinary day, no one would be in the median.
“What is it?” a woman asked beside me.
“It’s Frager’s,” I said.
“What?”
“Frager’s, the hardware store.”
“Oh no,” she said, drawing out the o. “Oh that’s so sad. I saw the smoke all the way from Smithsonian.”
A man walking a dog crossed the median in front of me, head down, unimpressed. An elderly couple monitored the scene from the sidewalk, commenting on the amount of fire trucks you would need for a fire like this and whipping their heads around at the sound of– “sure enough”– another one approaching. Cellphones held high, people lined up their shots and tapped before being ushered from one side of the street to the other by a cop winding yellow caution tape around a streetlamp.
In the middle of the blocked-off street, a teenage girl strutted in her school uniform exclaiming loudly to her friend, “Look–people taking pictures! That is so sad! That is so sad!”
I stayed there awhile. I was drawn to the bystanders– why did some people stop and linger and why did some people walk by, heads down? What’s the point of hanging around? Perhaps I, like some of them, couldn’t pull myself away, couldn’t get any closer, couldn’t stop the 90-year-old shop from disappearing, didn’t know why I was even there really except to watch, speculate, and take photos with my cellphone.
tap 
I only just came across your blog because you linked it on Facebook. I know this was written in a very different time and place but I wanted to say how good I think it is.
Joe- thank you, that’s really nice of you. Hope you’re doing well– I saw the SPX pizza party went down the other day, wish I could have made it!
Thanks! I am doing all right. So busy. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun! You have to make it to the next whatever-it-is we do. At the very least, we’d have ended up with some snazzy as heck shots from it!
In addition to your company, of course! haha