Great topic, David - I'd love to see links to some of your stories that you feel best address the search for home.
As for the homogeneity of suburbs, man, that's just a failure to look close enough. Witness American Beauty. There are cracks in the smoothest facade, and plenty of stories beneath the surface.
Here's a story of mine where I tried to show a little piece of home...
http://matadortravel.com/travel-blog/united-states/tim-patterson/town-highway-16
-Tim
Tim, Yes. Thanks for sharing this. I'd read this before, but after a second look I think I'd rank it up there with your very best stories. There's a sense of place, of knowing where you come from that makes the words ring true:
It is the poorest part of town, populated mainly by French Canadians, who scrape a living from the hills by logging, sugaring, raising cows and selling Christmas trees.
Only someone from there would use the word "sugaring."
Maybe I'm missing something, but to me your story illustrates a community--or at least a faction of its citizenry--still working together, still maintaining much of its original fire and bond with the land and place, in spite of change.
We grew up in two very different places.
It's ironic you mentioned American Beauty because supposedly the guy who wrote the screenplay was from Marietta. I've never fact-checked that, but it doesn't really matter: He captured the disconnection / madness (remember the scene where the wife starts slapping herself because she didn't sell the house?)of so many people where I grew up, the "cracks" as you call them, perfectly.
My point in raising this topic is not to generalize and say it's all mcshit, but rather to illicit more stories from these very cracks. To follow them. I believe these cracks are our natural response to a natural flow of humans needing to live together in tightly knit, intimate communities strongly rooted in place. (Which is the way most poor people still live all over the world, or at least what I've seen in many rural places throughout Latin America.)
But for many who've grown up in the American middle class, that natural flow is dammed. And because of it, cracks form. The military freak's son and his girlfriend follow a crack to New York, where there are others they can join up with.
I wish I had a good link to a story that captures my place, or the crack i've followed.
Rest assured I'm working on it. . .
"The concept of a home struck me in as we waited for our escorts. As a unabashed gypsy I really don’t have one. Not yet. No childhood homestead where generations of Olsons raised dairy cattle in Wisconsin. No family business passed from generation to generation in the same little berg or big city. Home has always been where ever on the planet I felt comfortable ( and sometimes not so comfortable). Work, men could sometimes entice me to stay for awhile, one place or another, perhaps two years, perhaps five. Never more. To call the cluster of canvas tents and wood buildings on the other side of the river home after one day did not feel at all far fetched. I knew I would be leaving in a definite period of time. For those of us with aerial roots the knowing when to go is oddly comforting. I slept with the breath of three rhinos below me on the river bank that night, happy to have a "home" for the month of May and the first week of June."
I made this observation on my first night camping on the Mkhaya Game Reserve in Swaziland. I came back to Northern Idaho after returning from Africa, leaving Las Vegas and the craziness of that city in the rear view mirror. For whatever reason I felt at home here during college over 20 years ago. So far terrestrial roots are growing. Perhaps it's all the huckleberries I've been munching on the past year. Who knows...but it's good, my instincts correct. I made a lousy Vegas chick.
"Uniqueness is the greatest success." W.H. Auden, poet.
I try not to write to much about where I live. If word got out as to where heaven was located, the developers would be swarming. But I did write a blog about mine and my parents communities--one inherited, one transplanted.
When I lived in Chicago, I lived within 100 feet of over 50 people. I knew almost none of their names, and half of them barely spoke english (my building was full of Romanians and one indian family). When our apartment was broken into--a feat that required the breech of two locked doors--no one came forth with anything...none of them offered solace to my wife, sobbing in the street as the police secured the apartment.
But it wasn't just the language barrier. When I was in South Carolina, we were less than a stone's throw from three or four families. Unfortunately, the only people who would talk to us weren't originally from Beaufort. One evening my brother and I almost had to lay out a guy who was getting belligerent about how he "...was originally from here." Maybe if I had been a baptist...
Today, I could barely throw a rock and hit my nearest neighbor. To my left lives the brother of the village clerk (who is only in the office for half-days on Tuesday, Thursday); he has a plow blade for his four wheeler, and so plows everyones driveway (free of charge, of course). Across the street is Jack, a retired parole officer with an adult autistic son; he has a passion for woodworking. The town police once knocked on my door at 11:00 p.m...after hauling in groceries, I'd left my trunk open.
I still don't know what path it took. I'm sortof back where I started, within driving distance of all the people I knew growing up; however my house--my neighborhood--was unknown to me in all of my years being raised here. Did my circumstances change, or did my perspective change?
I think in the end, you can't "build" a community. I think the problems with those "McSuburbs" is that people move there specifically to build communities. They're essentially trying to replicate what they see in the "small towns"--complete with low crime rate. Having grown up in small towns though, there are certain qualities that can't be provided by a developer, that can't be seen by an outsider.
Communities are the byproduct of need, not desire. In Chicago, people move to the 'burbs so that they can have the best of both world--big city money, small town life. Once you have money, you don't have to worry about anything...
...including your neighbors.
Fascinating thread, all, and thanks for getting it started, David.
I recently re-discovered a journal entry I wrote for a high school writing class, about "home" and "writing what you know". Apparently I felt that most short stories about home and childhood fit into a few categories: rural farming/fishing community (see: Alistair MacLeod, some early Alice Munro such as Lives of Girls and Women), small town American life (see: Sherwood Anderson, early John Updike), tedium/twistedness of the suburbs (not a short story, but American Beauty is a good example), or gritty inner city living, usually featuring religious/ethnic minorities and/or recent immigrants. I was frustrated because I didn't see any place for my experience - I didn't fit any of those categories, and I wrote that I wished I'd grown up someplace where generations of men went down the mines or out to sea, or where the whole town went to the high school football game on a Friday night. ("In Football Season" is one of my favourite Updike short stories of all time - check it out.)
David wrote: "What do you consider your home place and community? What was your pathway there?"
For some reason, those are questions I've always had a lot of trouble answering, largely because the bits and pieces of answers I have don't fit any of my preconceived categories.
I've lived in 16 houses in 5 cities spread across 3 Canadian provinces and one English county. For those formative pre-teen and teen years I was shuttling between amicably-divorced parents every friday, parents of middle-class upbringing working blue collar jobs, living in rental housing on the fringes of an upper middle-class neighbourhood in order to qualify for the extremely high-class public schooling in the area.
I've never written much about "where I'm from" because I can't make the details fit an established narrative. Does that make sense? Maybe that is what you guys are getting at with the "cracks" in the suburbs - that no one fits the categories.
I stumbled across this while doing some other research. I knew I could find someone who reflects my sentiments about community better than me.
Anyway, the following is an excerpt from a speech given by John Gardner, former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, in 1998. A former Marine Captain in WWII, Psychologist, former head of the Latin American section fo the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence. He also presided over the creation of the Public Broadcasting Corporation.
The Speech is entitled "American Experiment. Any boldfaced emphasis is my own doing.
The unraveling of the social fabric that we see today is legitimate cause for worry. A society, with its thriving institutions and great ventures, its power structure, its enormous capacity to reward and punish, may seem like a huge, unshakable edifice. But it is built on intangibles--a web of mutual obligations; shared beliefs, religious and secular; laws and customs; agreed-upon processes of governing; caring, trust and responsibility. Weaken those beyond a certain point and the great edifice--to quote Prospero in The Tempest--"melts into air, into thin air."
The intangible bonds of society hold within bounds the savagery of which humans are capable, ensure order, and make possible the accomplishment of shared purpose. When the web of community unravels, fearful things happen. Children gunning down children in the school yard. The daily news offers countless grim examples.
Some observers, perceiving the element of moral disintegration in the unraveling, leap to the conclusion that the teaching of moral values is the only necessary ingredient for recovery. But moral values are not created by people who give lectures on moral values. Moral values are inseparable from family and community, and the necessary ingredient for recovery is the re-building of community. Values are the fruit of the tree. If the apple trees are gone, don't expect apples. That is the prime reason for re-building community--not to re-create a cozy and nostalgic neighborliness but to provide the mutual obligations, social controls, trust and responsibility that are generated in family and community.
We are beginning to see that in our glorification of the unrestrained self, we forgot that the achievement of our shared goals (establish justice, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty, etc.) depends on some measure of social cohesion. What we need is a reasonable balance between the claims of individuality and the claims of community.
I think the long and short of his speech is that if we have "lost" community, then we are not going to "find" it...rather, we'll build it through our children.
The full text of what must have been a very impassioned-but-sleep-inducing speech can be found here.
Eva wrote:
"I've never written much about "where I'm from" because I can't make the details fit an established narrative. Does that make sense?"
Yes. It makes absolute sense.
But don't you think that's why, at least in part, you're a writer? You're writing the narrative that didn't exist, the narrative into which your life fits since no other story could contain it.
Here's an old post I wrote on the abiding connection between land and people in Japanese culture...
The four girls gossiping at the bus stop in front of Utashinai Junior High School this evening were catching snow bugs, swarms of tiny gnat-like insects floating white and weightless on the golden air. The bugs hatch late in the day in mid-October, timing their emergence with the gasping brilliance of fall color that sweeps down from the mountains to flood the valley with dusty orange and dripping spots of red.
Snow bugs look just like the first flakes of winter, little bits of white fluff drifting about aimlessly on breezes that make you wish for a wool hat and a warm pair of gloves. When they arrive, the real snow is never far behind. The next storm to blow in from the Japan Sea will leave the hilltops shining with something more permanent than frost, and by late November the old men in town will wake up early to spend mornings clearing the sidewalk in front of their homes.
Taking time to acknowledge the subtle signs that mark the flow of seasons is an act deeply embedded in this culture. Indeed, for many Japanese, the very idea of distinct seasons is so closely linked to their sense of national identity that they are shocked and dismayed to learn that other countries have a summer, winter, autumn and spring.
The broader myth of Japanese uniqueness is a concept close to the heart of many people here, especially among the older generation. Even as fast food chains replace soba stands and English seeps into train stations and talk shows, the grandmothers and grandfathers who survived the Second World War speak of their homeland as a land apart, separate and removed from the disorderly and unfamiliar rhythms of gaikoku, a word that encompasses everywhere that is not Japan.
Traditional art forms like flower arranging, calligraphy and the tea ceremony are at their core a means of showcasing the mood of the land. Calligraphy nearly always contains a reference to nature – the autumn moon, plum blossoms or chirping frogs – and displays of verse are phased in and out to match the season. Likewise, although much is made of the rigid form that governs the tea ceremony, the seasonal changes a master makes in the presentation of tea, such as the choice of sweet and pottery, are at least as important as adhering to the proper order of preparation. A well-chosen flower arrangement or scroll is a mark of sophistication in any inn or private home, meaning, in other words, that culture (the kind you can spell with a “d”) is a measure of one’s attunement with the natural world.
The same can be said for Japanese cooking, which places a great emphasis on the use of seasonal foods. This is a practical way of eating – food in season is cheap, readily available and delicious – but it is also a link to nature at the most basic of levels. Importing food to these islands was an impossibility until quite recent times, which means that from the beginning of history, every Japanese person was, in a purely physical sense, wholly a product of their ancestral land and the surrounding sea.
While Japan is hardly unique among indigenous cultures in this regard, its extreme geographic isolation and the weight of a national history that was already ancient in the time of Columbus brought about an interdependency between life and land stronger than in the continental nations of Europe, Africa and the Americas. Looking around the staffroom at the Junior High School, I see Mr. Middle Mountain, Mr. Small Pine and Ms. Rice-Field in a Narrow Valley. Religion too, is rooted in the land. It was only natural for the Japanese to place their gods and spirits in rice fields, rivers and mountains, celebrating the harvest with pagan festivals of fire, fertility and booze.
Of course, tell all that to the salary-man living on curry rice, greasy hamburgers and beer, or the mullet-sporting teenagers who know all about hip-hop fashion (well, apart from mullets) but couldn’t tell you what plant tofu is made from. It’s difficult to reconcile the shallow, overworked and fashion-obsessed Japan of today with the slow, solemn earthiness of traditional life. Can flower arranging survive in a culture where the current obsession is a leather-wearing pelvic-thrusting comic who calls himself Hard Gay? Does the name Furukawa (Old River) mean anything in a land where running water in any form is choked off and blocked in by dams and concrete banks?
In truth, it is misleading to conflate modern day Japan with its feudal equivalent. Many traditions – ritual suicide by sword, for instance - are truly a thing of the past. However the links between land and people that formed the nation of Japan will not fade so easily, regardless of how nature is mistreated. The connection survives in habits, sometimes unnoticed, but rarely neglected.
Japanese keep gardens, not lawns, every letter, and most e-mails, begin with a comment about the weather and shrines still dot forests, fields and mountains - like mushrooms after a rain.
Joined: 08-13-06
This was from Mei-Ling's excellent blog "Another Bridge to San Francisco," about returning home:
"What I’ve learned through my hundreds of comings and goings, is that it is okay to feel an easy kind of belonging."
Indeed. That distance from longing to belonging--is what so many of us, it seems, are trying to cross.
I have meditated and written on this topic for years, and always find myself coming back to the same basic concept: for many of us, whether we've grown up in the city or the suburbs, our childhood into our young adulthood has been defined by a need and a search for community, a sense of place and of belonging.
In so many instances, especially in the suburbs, small, recognizable communities have been displaced / developed / transformed into something unrecognizable.
Or maybe universally recognizable: McSuburbs.
Do you have any thoughts on this? A story? What do you consider your home place and community? What was your pathway there? Was it a crossing from longing to belonging, or something else entirely?
holla.