III
It was time to seek out my lodgings in a bed and breakfast in Dupont Circle, a bright area of bars, minor embassies and inquisitive dogs on very long leads. Walking from the Dupont Circle metro station, past the usual array of Scientologists and bizarre newspapers, the first thing you notice is the vast potholes in the streets – almost enough to engulf a British Mini. Then there are the real estate notices outside the houses for sale, many with photos of the smiling estate agent you would be dealing with. Could these people really believe their hairstyles would help sell houses? It hardly seemed possible. Dupont Circle is also a city centre outpost of Irish bars –‘give us your thirsty, your famished …’ says one of them; a neighbourhood of ice cream vendors in shiny basements and strangely unkempt photocopy centres.
Every Washingtonian has a detailed inventory of exactly how safe each street can be. The subject seems to obsess them. Dupont Circle was described to me as ‘pretty safe’. But since it is near the more dangerously cosmopolitan district of Adams-Morgan, I was urged to be careful. Yet when I arrived at my bed and breakfast lodging to find everybody out, there was an envelope addressed to me sticking out of the letter box. Inside was the front door key and a note. ‘Hi,’ it said. ‘Welcome. The round key opens the front door, but please lock it when you get inside. Thanks. Irene.’
I struggled with the door once I had got through it, trying to work out how to lock it again. I thought it was worth following the instructions. Up the stairways, there was an unexpected clutter of statuettes, Indian wall-hangings with fake precious stones, sentimental pictures of fin de siècle actresses, heroic pictures of elephants. It was a bed and breakfast tour de force, all gathered around a worn red stair carpet and a large number of tiny faded handwritten notes of instructions for the guests. ‘Please use the shower for no more than three minutes to conserve water. Thanks. Irene’, said one. ‘Please turn off the light in the bathroom. Thanks. Irene’, said another.
When I made it to my bedroom on the top floor, there was a similar East-meets-West collection in there, setting off the white iron bedstead to advantage, cooled by the breeze from two fans. I stared out of the window watching people in the surrounding apartments relaxing in front of the television or pottering around the kitchen. This was rather nosy of me, I admit, but Washingtonians don’t seem to favour curtains, and it was purely in the interests of research.
My eye was drawn away by the sight of a most unusual bearded Buddha figure on the top shelf of the rattling white bookshelf in the corner. There was a note on it, and fascinated, I climbed gingerly on to a stool to find out what it was. I had hoped it would explain what was clearly an object of great antiquity, but the note said: ‘Please don’t put wet clothes over the furniture. Thanks. Irene’.
I met Irene the following morning, as she made me breakfast. She was an ebullient character, with a mound of carefully crafted dyed black hair and an encyclopaedic knowledge of English stately homes, which she expected me to reciprocate. She was not very interested in my quest, or about new kinds of money. She urged me instead to go and see a number of local galleries, and in particular, Dumbarton Oaks, where the original agreement to set up the United Nations had been signed half a century before. And I’m afraid I never did.
I even told her about Edgar Cahn. ‘He sounds like a commie, pinko socialist,’ she said, with a little laugh to show she was only half-serious.
IV
I wanted to see a time dollar bank in action, and set out after breakfast to look at one of the biggest, the Co-operative Caring Network – run by an enormous charitable monster called the United Seniors Health Co-operative (USHC).
After a little while in the USA, you realize that politically correct language has developed in a different way from its British equivalent. In the UK, it keeps changing as the shadowy people who decide these things hit on different ways of ‘telling the truth’, but has generally settled down to words which are unambiguous. British campaigners for the rights of elderly people have now hit on the idea of calling them ‘older’, which has the benefit of being manifestly true. Not so in the USA, where the word ‘die’ is shunned, as you might expect in a delicately polite spa town like Leamington. Americans say ‘passed away’ or even ‘passed’, which conjures up lavatories. They also avoid the term ‘old’: they call old people ‘seniors’. The most evocative title of an organization for ‘seniors’ I found was the American Association for Advanced Living. Or as Roger Daltrey might have said: ‘I hope I die before I get advanced’.
There is a tremendous and attractive American urge to look on the bright side, which seems to be particularly apparent in Washington. As I sauntered up to the palatial tower block which housed the USHC, I passed an old lady with three large sacks containing what I assumed were her worldly possessions. She was singing ‘Give my Regards to Broadway’.
The Co-operative Caring Network (CNN) was an enormously ambitious project set up in 1993, aiming to involve 15,000 people, fifty different member organizations and shelling out time dollars to pay for up to 700,000 hours of work a year. They even had plans to record people’s transactions by voicemail: all you would have to do was phone them up and tell them. IBM had donated six computers, the telephone giant Bell Atlantic had volunteered some of its staff, and each participant was going to pay $15 in dollars for the privilege of taking part. You didn’t have to be Einstein to realize that, however much they may have been earning in time dollars, they would also be raking in up to $225,000 a year.
As I was to discover, the Network never quite worked out as planned, but they are still one of the biggest time dollar banks in the USA. And to prove it, I had been given a pile of leaflets explaining the whole idea. ‘Co-operative Caring Network gives “credit” for the volunteer work you do,’ said their introductory leaflet. ‘For each hour you spend providing a volunteer service, CCN will give you a care credit.’ There were piles of other leaflets in different colours and languages, all with the same cartoon of a bald man with a moustache looking deeply perplexed. ‘Xe toi can sua chua,’ he was saying. ‘Vay, bang cach noa me toi co the gen van phong bac-si duoc?’
I was also given a list of happy success stories, couched in rather strange formal language. ‘Estell Barrios earns Care Credits by providing clerical support to CCN staff,’ said one of them. ‘Ms Barrios cashed her credits in for handy man services. We assigned Mr Eduard Walker to help Ms Barrios out with a few odds and ends around her home.’
Others read more like Dateline: ‘Maria Massey is a visually impaired senior, residing in Arlington, Virginia. Ms Massey requested a person to accompany her for walks. We found Mr Clark Egbert who is also an Arlington resident to walk with Ms Massey. Mr Egbert also has volunteered to pay Ms Massey friendly visits and take her for drives to the park for their walk. They are happy with the match.’
The CNN offices were unexpectedly expensive, in a large gleaming grey office block on Fifteenth Street, in Washington’s commercial district. I took the lift to the fourth floor to meet Farrell Didio, the manager. She explained that the network linked thirty-three organizations in the Washington area, from Virginia in the south to Maryland in the north – covering flats, libraries, parks, old people, anything in fact which needed volunteer support. There are now 1,600 of them, which is not quite the planned 15,000, but impressive nonetheless.
Six federal ‘volunteers’ help Farrell and her assistant to administer the system, helping each network out if they find they can’t service a request. Most of them are concerned with helping old people stay healthy and active and in their homes – not for the kind of things the health or social services should