Terracotta

I'm going to paint my new apartment Terracotta.

Fire Dance, to be exact. It’s a Benjamin Moore shade. Once I found it I spent a week going to the Janovic web site's virtual paint brush page and trying it out in a variety of rooms.

“Good, right?” I’d say to my co-worker. After she had voiced her approval no less than five times, she took to not looking up from her work and merely grunting.

Painting a room a color other than white is like getting a new hairdo. There's a need to know exactly how it will look before taking the leap. Holding the magazine picture up in the mirror never does the trick. Neither, unfortunately, does the Janovic virtual paint brush. But last night providence intervened.

My Dad and Stepmom took me out to eat in Potomac Village. The village is a cluster of gas stations, shops, supermarkets and restaurants in the middle of the Maryland suburb where they live and where I grew up. As Potomac is horse country, the highlight of my childhood visits to the village consisted of going to the Surrey, a riding gear store, and beseeching whichever parent I was with for a new crop. However in the wake of Bethesda, a neighboring suburb whose downtown area has exploded into a virtual metropolis, Potomac Village has stepped it up.

Shops are now chic and manifold. The old, post-riding class hamburger joint is still there, but along with it are a French bakery, an elegant Italian joint, and the new, Asian fusion establishment where we dined last night. This establishment could just as well have been in midtown Manhattan. There were five different kinds of martini and $46 entrees. There was a complimentary poke appetizer, poke being a wonton with spicy tuna inside and creamy wasabi sauce on the outside. Outside in the parking lot alongside sport utility vehicles, SAAB’s and sports cars, a Barwood cab sat in an empty space.

“A cab? In Potomac?” I said.

“Sometimes people like to take it home after a night out on the town,” my Dad responded.

This statement was still running through my mind as we were seated and given menus minutes later. Then I looked up and all feelings of what the hell happened to my hometown were instantly washed away, replaced by an instant appreciation of suburban development, globalization, and gas stations that sell lattes.

This is because this poke-serving establishment, in a hamlet that used to consider quiche risqué, has painted its walls Terracotta. Here there and everywhere. Terracotta. And I thought, as I ordered myself a sour cherry martini, that it looked pretty damn good.