Welcome home

7/10/24

I took a hiatus from this blog while pushing toward the finish line of my book The New Suburbia.  I felt like I needed to conserve all of my writing energy for the book – maybe a silly idea in retrospect – but at the time that last push of writing and editing was seriously draining my entire being.

The book came out in January, and I’ve spent the last few months giving book talks, interviews, and talking with many people about suburbia and often hearing their own reflections and experiences in response to what I have to say.  After working like a mole for years on this project, it’s finally seeing the light of day and finding its audience.  

It feels like the book is settling in. 

Every morning, early, I take a walk around my suburban neighborhood while it’s cool and quiet.  And it’s been on my walks that I’ve told myself, I need to start blogging again. Ideas bubble up – sometimes from things I observe right in front of me, like a neighbor who does a beautiful job remodeling their home then plants tall hedges in front of it to block the view from the street, and I think, that is such an unsocial act that is truly bad for the neighborhood. Then I get to my desk and a million other things crowd to the front. 

This morning, I’m finally doing it.  

This one is inspired by a dinner with friends last night, friends from my own suburban childhood in South Pasadena.

We met in a restaurant not far from where we grew up – some of them still live in South Pas, one drove in from Thousand Oaks, another from Orange County, others from closer by. The initiator of this dinner had flown in from Texas. We were neighbors and classmates from elementary school, some of us since kindergarten. Our ties are thick, our memories visceral.  I feel a deep sense of comfort around these friends.

One thing we reflected on last night is just that – how deep and meaningful these neighborly ties were to us, how they defined our childhood. With my down-the-street neighbor especially, we remembered going to each other’s house, being fed by our moms, feeling relaxed and unselfconsciously comfortable going back and forth, hanging out in these family spaces. There was love. And it was among neighbors.  

We reflected too that we’ve never really felt this again in our lives – among neighbors. And that our kids missed out on this. 

In my research, I found this same kind of neighborly closeness in suburbs like Lakewood and San Marino in the 1950-60s, a singular time in history where this sort of neighborly tenderness was alive and real in suburbs across America. Those suburbs, at the time, were also lily white. 

But in South Pasadena, in our hilly development built in the 1960s, it was different. I haven’t researched this history, but I surmise the developer of our neighborhood backed fair housing, because our neighbors were a mix of whites, Blacks, Chinese Americans, and Latinos. And on our street alone, here were the occupations of the dads – architect/engineer, doctor, garbage collector, lawyer, and (underpaid) biochemist (my dad). A lot of the moms were stay-at-home, but not all.   

To me, this was all normal. But in the course of writing my book, it became clear to me that our little corner of suburbia was something of an outlier for the time.  

When I was scrambling to finish my book and find an image for the cover, I emailed this same group of friends asking, “Do any of you have a photo that conveys suburban diversity?”  One responded, “Here you go.” It was perfect. It was us.  

photo by Audrey Dorf, South Pasadena.

This was a birthday party from 1970. That’s me in the front row. We were living the new suburbia, without really knowing it.  I think I had this story in my bones from a long time ago.   

It feels great to be around these friends who share these memories, bound by a place. This neighborhood had meaning for us and, quite miraculously, it’s still resonating.