I blow the steam off my coffee before I sip. Staring out the window at the strip mall reminds me that I hate the suburbs. It was the dream of my parents and grandparents generation to move to the suburbs and own a home. But the empty storefronts seem cold, especially when around the corner there is a new strip mall with new big box stores, while the others rot a few hundred yards away.
In this family restaurant I look around at the other early morning diners. Mostly old men complaining about the government and discussing the same things they probably discuss every time they meet up here. I pretend i am in a small town, or maybe a bustling city, probably the type of place most of these old-timers started out in, since this suburb was just a few farms not even twenty-five years ago. I idealize the small town and the city. My wife and I plan our move, we plan our escape, but I remind myself that nowhere is perfect. But there has to be a place for us better than here.
I once expressed my disdain for the suburbs, and my mother tearfully replied that they had moved here for us, so that we could have a better life and good schools. I realized that these rows of identical subdivisions and strip malls had been a promised land for some at one time. Hell, maybe even today it is a place of hope for some. But to me, it just feels bankrupt of individuality, spirit and promise. There is nothing to do here but shop, go out to eat and go back to your home entertainment center until you get sleepy and crawl off to bed. Sate your hunger with shopping, then take a siesta. No community. No community to speak of. If there is community, I have not found it.
We tried at church, and it almost worked, but most of the people there are older than us and we just don't see eye to eye. Not on politics or religion or anything. Not that our values are so much different. Not that they aren't nice people with good hearts. Not like we are trying to throw out everything we were raised under. It just does not feel right. We need to move on.
The coffee has cooled enough that I can almost gulp it down, and I do. The hot liquid almost scalding my throat as it goes down, down, down to the last drop and the few grounds that had settle to the bottom. I swallow the grounds too.
I stopped driving the surface streets to work, even though it is more direct, because it takes me through rotting suburb after suburb. It is almost like a history of urban sprawl. From our little suburban paradise, built up in the eighties and nineties, you move back in time to the idyllic suburbs of the seventies, then the sixties and fifties and forties until you arrive in the city where my employment is found. Right on the edge of the old inner city, where it is hard to tell where one municipality ends and the other begins, a line used to be clearly drawn. A racial and economic line. A line that kept opportunity and a better life separate from the abandoned inner city. An artificial line built up by racism. This line was defended vigorously as whites were allowed to cross safely to the side of opportunity while blacks were held back, locked into the city limits. Capital and jobs and ownership left with the whites. The brought the titles and deeds with them and then jacked up the rent prices. The whites retreated and scorched the earth as they did so. They had scorched the earth, sewn the fields with salt and then balked at the blacks for not growing their own economic success. And the whites continued to retreat from the city center and each decade spread out farther and farther. That is all I can see when I drive through suburban stronghold after suburban stronghold. The legacy of segregation writ across a metropolis.
So after tipping my waitress I pay my bill, pull on my coat, pull into traffic and am on my way. I bypass the surface streets by taking the freeway. It is a path that is nine miles longer than just driving straight through suburban kingdoms, lined up like a living suburban timeline, but it takes me ten minutes less time, and it avoids the scenery that reminds me of how much I hate the suburbs.
I would move out, but my family is here and my mortgage is here and I have nowhere to go just yet.
I don't want to move in haste, or I could end up somewhere worse!
The freeway is crowded with other suburbanites flooding the city for their daily work.
And together we will rush back out again in the evening.
