I went ahead and agreed in principle to buy the used car from Bethesda suburbanites John and JoAnn, whose 1990 Integra we test-drove last weekend. John continued to irritate me with his anti-Washington DC banter, and Susan and I came close to bagging the whole deal because we found the human relations factor too bothersome to bear. John had insisted that the car be inspected for mechanical problems at a Bethesda mechanic, at his own expense, rather than let me pay to take it to my mechanic in the city, because he was too worried about the car entering the infamous District of Columbia. If my poor city is the subject of so much ignorant fear only miles outside its borders, I shudder to think what a gruesome reputation it has at greater distances.

I do my share of complaining about DC: sidewalks that stay half-repaired, potholes you could bathe in, on-again-off-again recycling programs, and an soon-to-be-former mayor who was triumphantly reelected only a couple years after finishing his prison term for a widely televised crack rap. But I always recognize the fact that I live in the city by choice, and I have no desire to turn tail for the burbs. It's a marvelous town. You only need head to Pershing Park in winter, only a couple blocks from the White House, and go ice skating on the little pond that serves as a fountain in summertime, to know that the myth of Washington as the soulless mill for faceless technocrats and seedy hucksters is just a lot of crap. It's a very human-sized city. I find it hard to hear it savaged by people who live in prefabricated enclaves where they must drive to get out and interact with the world.

I often think I detect a countermelody of racism in the comments of those who most enjoy insulting Washington. It's in the seemingly harmless joking that I see shadows of a malevolent undertone: that a city of African Americans can't possibly be trusted to run effectively. It's the same social Darwinism that tells us that African countries continue to be poor because of a shared genetic predisposition for low intelligence, resulting in correspondingly inept and corrupt governments. The result, in the city and on the world stage, is that the colonies stay colonized. Those who benefit always have perfectly reasonable explanations of why it isn't about skin color. All you can do is wonder if they believe themselves.

Then there's more blatant bigotry. On the night I was Volunteer Coordinator for the Ryan White Awards, I was accosted by a ticketholder who was furious because he'd had no idea that the theater was in such a bad neighborhood. The Lincoln Theater is in a fairly run-of the-mill neighborhood, as DC goes: it's better than some and worse than others. But it's a black neighborhood, and he wasn't going to street-park his Cherokee anywhere in the vicinity. Instructed to fix the situation without refunding his money, I found a parking spot for him behind the theater, and privately wished him a lifetime of car trouble in the nice neighborhoods of his choice.

While kicking around the Web last night, I somehow stumbled on to a page maintained by the parents and friends of a girl who was kidnapped earlier this year in California. Following the links out of this site led me to site after site of organizations trying to publicize the disappearances of young people around the nation. I peered at entire pages of grainy photographs of children who had run away, or been taken by people they did or didn't know, or simply vanished without apparent trace on what might otherwise have been an unremarkable day in their young lives.

I spent some time visiting this world. The small photographs of the missing were often taken from school pictures, or candid shots snapped in a moment when neither photographer nor subject could have imagined what would eventually happen to that image. At some point after the disappearance, a parent or relative must have searched through the solidified past of photo albums to extract this split-second of vanished experience. As they passed page after page of captured smiles, birthdays, and vacations, the parents may have felt that the all those innocent and unaware people were now irretrievable missing, gone on into a more malevolent land, never likely to return.

Looking at those photographs, I wondered if the parents had been told to pick the photo which was most likely to help a stranger identify their child. If that was true, all these pictures were chosen because they captured a moment in which these kids looked most like themselves. I spent an hour or so looking at photos and trying to guess what about each picture made it the best representation of the missing kid. An expression? Their most recent hairstyle? The mole on the cheek? Or was this simply the last picture taken before the disappearance? It was a strange and rather stupid game to play with other people's losses. I checked through all the photos for Maryland, DC, and Virginia. I wanted to see one of those faces and experience a shock of recognition. Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, I didn't know any of them.