Meditations on Suburban Living

In my mind, the word "suburb" plants pictures of smiling Caucasian-Americans, golden retrievers, two-story houses with oddly-placed Roman facades and quintessential white picket fences--a pastiche that makes me uneasy and Sam Mendes' an Oscar-winning millionaire.

So, why, my friends may wonder, am I currently living in one of the richest suburbs in America?

That's a good question.

In the three weeks that I've been living in Rockville, Maryland, I've heard coworkers call it the "Orange County of the East Coast" and the community college that I teach at "Harvard on the Pike." As I look around my neighborhood, I don't question their comparisons.

The streets here are all named after high-class universities: Duke, Yale, Fordham, Rutgers. The elementary school is called College Gardens (doesn't it just inspire images of carefully planted cabbage-patch children emerging one day as proud college graduates?). And the houses themselves are certainly suburban-worthy: Witness the panels of wood nailed to the side of each window, simulacra in one of its most absurd and unquestioned forms, and ADT Security signs outnumbering "Welcome" mats 2:1 as the preferred way to decorate your doorstep.

All of which got me thinking: what draws a person to the suburbs anyway?

I realize not everyone spends every minute of their lives thinking and rethinking their decisions in quite the same way that I often do, but the environment in which your children will be raised, your middle-aged decades will be lived out--that's the kind of decision I'd expect people to reason through. I suppose there are some standard answers:

1) Safety. The suburbs are presumably "safe" because they are removed from the dangers of the "inner city." And few things are as effectively mythologized as the dangers of the inner city. The gehenna known as the ghetto, the "urb" that spawned the "suburb," is the boogie man for all suburbanites, the sprawl that keeps the outskirts skirting.

2) Peace. It has been said that peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. Something to continue to ponder.

3) Quiet. The suburbs lack the predictable noise of the city: the congestion, the block parties and backyard barbeques, the street games, the teen hangouts, the unhappy neighbors who broadcast their domestic difficulties in surround-sound through apartment walls, ceilings, and floors. But there's more: The suburbs lack, too, the noise of the forest, the ocean, the river, the mountain because with every tree in its place and every blade of grass carefully trimmed, the cacophony of chaotic creation is carefully controlled.

Which may explain why, for the past two days, as I've walked through my neighborhood to work, I've had Thoreau's quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" stuck in my head. As I look around my "peaceful," "safe," indeed desperately "quiet" neighborhood, it's the desperation--not the peaceful, safe quiet--that seems to strike and echo in my mind.

As this is only a meditation, I don't have any good answers to my question, Why do people move to the suburbs? I know I live here because my house is a half mile from my office, which means I can walk/bike to work and avoid "THE COMMUTE," the devil spawn of the suburbs that keeps my coworkers in their cars 15 hours a week compared to my 15 minutes a morning and evening of "fresh" (relatively speaking, of course, to the exhaust-choked Beltway) air.

I suppose I'm luckier than many, too: My suburban streets border the Upper Watts Branch Forest Preserve, which means for at least 5 minutes of my mornings and evenings, I'm able to imagine the ghosts of what once was, as I did this weekend. On Sunday, I veered a few hundred feet into the preserve by means of a blink-and-you-miss-it trail off the sidewalk. I walked until I couldn't see the curbs or corners anymore, and let my eyes trace the towering trunks upwards, following their spines up to the sky. After a moment, my eyes adjusted and I realized that the treetops were swaying in the gentle wind, each massive white oak waving gracefully to the other. I stood still, my head tilted up, humbled by how wrong I have ever been to think of a tree as anything other than the most alive of creatures. Each timber was as lithe as any dancer, delighting in its fluid and natural movements. While I watched their coup de theatre, I sighed and said thank you, and as I left the preserve, I whispered an apology to the remnants of what must have once been a great ocean of gracious, waving oaks. I think now that there are many kinds of reservations, and they all give witness to a terrible failure to coexist.

So, while I may not yet see the suburbs as a likely environment to nourish my soul, I am finding moments here to practice what is called "spotting the sacred." And I think this is vital. I imagine this will be easy to do when the cherry blossoms arrive, with their pink-petal presages of spring, but sometimes, spotting the sacred can be difficulty at winter's end, when seeds planted before the snows fell have yet to resurface after the snow's melt. In these moments, it's easy to wonder if our work from the past will yield a harvest--or if the things we've cared for, prayed for, waited for, hoped for, have faltered in the cold and gray. This moment before rebirth, like the second before breaking the water's surface and taking in a desperate breath, can seem to stretch us beyond our belief, tempt us to turn away, to lose faith. But we have signs if we are willing. Even now, I can see the buds emerging on the tips of the trees on my street. But I have to look for them, or I move too quickly past, and miss a moment meant to remind me that life has a way of reemerging. Even in the suburbs.