And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Like everything else in Arlington, it seems, it's only a matter of time before the old gets replaced by the new. Bob Peck Chevrolet is gone, a monument to 1950's America if ever there was one, carted off piece by piece.

The Vietnamese strip of Clarendon is gone now, too, the climbing vines that surrounded Little Viet Garden for so many years now sitting underneath a bulldozer's tread.

Gone is the great elm on Glebe, the one that turned fire engine red each Halloween, the one with the rope swing. (It's no wonder. The house it belonged to is gone, now not one but two brand spanking new homes.)

The sweet Armenian shoe repair man has moved on, though I preferred calling him the cobbler, and a new high-rise is going in where his shop once stood.

My lab, at 1916 Wilson, the lab I loved for so many years will be gone by year's end, victim of a digital world.

And today, as I drove up that very boulevard in the rain, I looked to the left and saw that my favorite wall was gone. It was just a wall, really, a crumbling, tri-colored relic of another era, complete with that cherry-on-top of an OK sign. The OK sign was dismantled months ago, but today was the first time I noticed the wall had disappered as well.

And what a wall it was.

Matt