News and notes from Reston (tm).

Monday, January 7, 2013

Flashback Monday: A Post Card From a Post-Modern Community

postcard front.jpeg

Your grandparents may have told you about a long-ago, simpler time, back when people wanted to "text," they'd send each other brief messages in the mail, using something called a "post card." Well, here's one from our beloved earth-toned community, showing Lakeview Cluster from some point during the Gulf Reston days. (Judging by the awkwardly posed person in the right foreground, "cropping" hadn't been invented yet, either.)

Someone call the Reston Museum, because we found one of these messages from an earlier time, and the innocence and wonder it conveys deserves to be sealed in amber for all time.

postcard back.jpeg

14 comments:

  1. There's no such cluster called Lakeview anymore. They must have changed their name to something else as part of some witness protection program.

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    Replies
    1. Yes there is, dog gonenit. I live there!

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    2. Lakeside, dammit, Lakeside!

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  2. Back in the day when I wanted to text somebody, a can of spray paint was usually involved.

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  3. Does Lake Anne ever freeze hard enough to ice skate?

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    Replies
    1. rarely. The lakes used to. I remember learning to skate on Lake Anne and Lake Thoreau

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  4. All Reston residents eventully come to know one Great Truth: Never, ever, tell anyone at RA or the DRB about your plans for changing your front door (or about that tree you are about to cut down in your backyard).
    Some neighborhoods are more tolerant than others of such changes, others have Neighborhood Nazis ruthlessly enforcing ridiculous rules.

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  5. I've been advising folks for years to take this same approach, Don. When it comes to RA/DRB, it is far easier to apologize for the error then it is to ask for permission.

    In fact, if you really want the tree gone, I would suggest poisoining it and over-pruning it until it's dead. Then RA/DRB have no say in whether the tree comes down or not.

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  6. It is nice to see the Sunfish on the lake. Growing up all the lakes had veritable regattas of sunfish on any given windy day.

    Now it is just those lame assed party barges with people stuffing their stupid fat faces and swilling booze that ply the lakes.

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  7. Look at that water! Could it ever be that clean again?

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    Replies
    1. Never was and never will be -- the lake is full of nothing but polluted run-off from the streets and dog-poop littered pathways.

      That image has clearly been altered by a cheap and lousy editor (or perhaps that was the state of the art airbrushing in the 1960s) -- one can see the "blue" over-washing the buildings behind it. Light does not reflect that way naturally, and there are no shadows on the water -- compare the chimney shadows and you will (not) see the hack job this is.

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  8. Ice on the lake...

    My at-the-time middle schoolers discovered that the bubbles in the ice were methane. A pack of matches and an ice-pick were deployed. Directly there was a shortage of eye brows and lashes among the boys of Langston Hughes.

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  9. Ice? With sailboats...clearly you discovered huffing and fried your brain.

    But with such polluted water, it's no surprise that the "lakes" of Reston disgorge methane.

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  10. And to think we moved here way back then because the Lake Anne waters were the self-same color as your 1956 Chevy Bel Air...

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