There’s one thing these days that it seems you can get everyone to agree on, whatever their political or cultural stripe: They all hate Washington, DC. One of my brothers is a stockbroker and a free-market conservative; the other is a reliably Democratic art director (who has donated to the local ACLU auction), and yet more than once, each one of them has called me up on the phone and said something like, “How’s life in the Bubble?”

How IS life in the Bubble? What IS it with you people up there? I don’t understand why I have to send all my hard-earned money to Washington, DC. And, my personal favorite: If you only lived in The Real World, like the rest of us, you’d understand why we hate you.

I moved to the DC metro in early 1998, and I’ve heard the exact same refrain through the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama administrations. Whether among liberals or conservatives, the broad stereotype is that people here are actively aiming to screw the little guy over. For liberals, just say “K Street,” and cue the image of too-cleanly-cut former prepsters turned lobbyists dining on steaks at The Palm, or the bogeyman of rabid, blond-haired Patrick Henry College students worshipping Strict Constructionism. For conservatives, raise the specter of “social engineering” and a phalanx of godless PhDs being paid by the government to take away your children. Condoms in gumball machines!

As you can see, I can have a lot of fun with this too. For the most part, it’s because those stereotypes bear little resemblance to the folks I know here, no matter what their politics or religious convictions are. I know a fabulous intellectual who works at the Family Research Council, and more than a few avowed socialists who are among the best parents I know.

There are a few stereotypes about DC denizens I could proffer, but they are unexceptionally tedious, and generally involve people who 1) cross streets while punching their Blackberries, 2) have international conference calls in the backs of cabs, and throw out twenty-dollar bills at the driver, 3) sit at lunch with their eyes occasionally wandering to the Blackberry open before them. My husband, who works as a broadcast engineer, was in the middle of setting up a complicated interview when a very well-known visiting pundit interrupted and asked him to go fetch a glass of water. Self-importance is an equal-opportunity affliction. That old Café Press “I’m Kind of a Big Deal” T-shirt is no exaggeration.

But then there’s the city itself, and that’s something different. People from New York, or from party-town places like Austin or New Orleans, invariably complain about how boring Washington is. In the national mind, Washington will never win the kind of funky-hometown accolades that “Charm City” Baltimore is routinely accorded.

Which is a shame, for a number of reasons: The city proper is stunningly beautiful, but even its most drab streets and suburbs seem to pulse with a kind of nervous tension, a sense of being part of a web of mysterious and ineffable connections. And there is also the sense one has of history being unexpectedly encountered: You round the counter and all of a sudden the gleaming stone monument is there, staring back, for a change, at you.

DC is also one of the nation’s great African-American cities, as writers from Edward P. Jones—who mapped the full range of the city’s black culture in his incomparable story collection Lost in the City—to the conservative writer Mark Gauvreau Judge have observed. At the same time, for the past couple of decades it has also been becoming one of the great Latino, Korean, and East African immigrant cities. The inner-ring suburb where I live, on the city’s unfashionable East Side, is a confluence of all these trends: an old white-flight suburb that gradually turned black and is now peppered with the diasporans of the world—including one ex-evangelical, ex-Mississippi Deltan: me.

As in all cities, filling Metro DC’s streets are millions of ordinary folk going to work, on foot or in cars, acting out their motions of faith as they move through the grid. May the good in all their efforts be blessed.

The week before last, on the night of the president’s alternately acclaimed or derided speech on health care, I had to take my husband to work in the middle of the night because his truck had died and we hadn’t succeeded in buying a new car. It had the urgency of an important mission: I woke up with him at 2:30 a.m., and we shared a cup of coffee while the 5-year-old soberly rose and dressed. I carried the bundled baby to the car.

At the very bottom of the night, long after all the commentators had disappeared from the cable TV screens and taken taxis home to bed, our little family sailed down tawdry New York Avenue into the city—past the “no-tell” motels that mostly got re-painted for the inauguration, Peacock Liquors (Cold Beer! First Stop in DC/Last Stop in DC!), and the gas stations filled with scantily-clad refugees from the hip-hop nightclub Love, in an old block of warehouses.

And the whole time, all I was thinking was, How happy I am, to be in this place, at this time! The children were both strangely awake and serene. My husband and I were joking, and when we kissed goodbye, that late-night wind that blows down the empty streets tousled our hair. After I dropped him off, I pointed my car East again and set out for home, the dome of the Capitol glowing like the Cheshire Cat on the edge of the horizon. This was once a very dangerous city and isn’t safe even now, but with my children in the back, I felt brave and unafraid. It was an adventure I hope that my son, at least, will always remember.

The next day we went out and bought a secondhand Volvo station wagon. The Chardonnay and the arugula are coming next, I suppose.