remembering home

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.
-Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago where lawns and nails are manicured regularly and prospective home buyers ponder such challenging questions as, two car garage or three? Our answer was three but that didn't stop my pubescent self from admiring other homes. There is one right on the corner when you turn into our subdivision that has castle-like turrets, complete with a fairytale glow around Christmas. Happiness, it turns out, is determined less by what you have than by what those around you have. Two psychologists from Harvard found, for example, that people would rather make $50,000 when others are earning $25,000 than make $100,000 when others are earning $200,000. (In my cash-challenged student state, I confess to finding some comfort in knowing that my friends now have to think twice about eating out too.)

Remembering, as Marker reminds us, is always a rewriting. So when I come home to Wheaton, my memories of childhood say more about where I've been than about the town itself. Suburban bliss or frustration à la American Beauty? After living in Pakistan and Kenya and then reading a lot of Marxist critique, the orderly lawns and lives grated on my nerves. The mall triggered my philosophical gag reflex. I sincerely, if misguidedly, began to see my childhood as a process of bourgeois mystification. SAT prep classes and pom pom camp were making me part of the bourgeois machine reproducing wealth and normalcy. The mystifying aspect was that it all seemed so good and innocent. I reflected on this invidious process while jogging around the neighborhood in my $120 Asics and thinking about my latest graduate seminar on alienation. (Don't worry, the irony is not lost on me.)

But, perhaps inevitably, I am no anti-capitalist revolutionary. I enjoy a frothy latte, a well-appointed gym and an occasional beach vacation - things familiar to the average suburban dweller. Though I love San Francisco, I see the appeal of a lawn, abundant parking and dog-poop-free sidewalks. On my jog yesterday, I passed a dad throwing a Frisbee with his three sons and a brother and sister riding their bikes around a cul-de-sac. I can appreciate how the order and repetition provide comfort. There is a safe kind of diversity: all the houses in my subdivision are slight variations of a half dozen or so model homes.

In the two weeks that I've been in Wheaton, my childhood hometown has reappeared before me. It's a quiet place with excellent public schools and a normalcy that is pregnant with the possibility of suburban rapture. SAT prep classes were a necessary drag, but plenty of fun was had between bowling alleys and football games. My friends and I went to Chicago for the Blues Fest loaded with blankets and coolers, but always caught the last train home. My parents would greet me with a late-night snack before I stumbled to bed. In this remembering, growing up was a fine balance between nurturing and freedom.

I'm not denying the existence of suburban dysfunction. (I will never understand the proliferation of cookie-cutter strip malls.) My family was different enough that I never felt it was all about keeping up with the Joneses. We covered an old minivan with philosophical musings like, "Wherever you go, there you are." And, yes, I drove that minivan to pom pom practice. From a San Franciscan or New Yorker perspective, that may very well be a narrow type of diversity, of acceptance. But the suburbs are not all about tragedy, conformity and repressed desires. The view of a sophisticated cosmopolitan can be, of course, just as narrow.

I'm not planning to move back anytime soon, but there is some liberation in this particular remembering of home. Now, when I jog by the glowing castle turrets, I feel neither envy nor disdain, but warmth.