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Country Mouse

Except in Wayne's World, there is little honor -- and less artistic status -- to be found in claiming the suburbs for home, but that's where I grew up, eight blocks north of the Seattle city line, in a small and mostly nameless early 1960s subdivision of well-built homes.

If I remember the story right, my parents chose between a big, rambling old house on Capitol Hill that my father wanted and my mother hated, and the newly constructed almost pink house on the hill in the Shoreline School District where I mostly grew up. Today I'd have chosen the old house on Capitol Hill, and taken it on as a renovation project, but we lived then on an associate professor's salary, they were raising two boys, and the suburbs promised safety and a better education. One of which proved true.

I used to have very strong legs from riding my bike around those hills. And, by junior high, it was faster to walk the short-cut through the cemetery than to ride the school bus, even if it sometimes meant climbing the gate on the back side. Mom came from the San Joaquin Valley, and was continually frustrated by the puny tomatoes she was able to grow in our Northwest clay. Seeking to conform to the neighborhood's covenants, we planted dwarf fruit trees with limbs from other species grafted on so as to aid pollination, but nothing much came of them past the blooms, and none survive today. Strawberries did tolerably well, and still do, the ones the birds leave behind. And there used to be a huge blackberry patch that I raided for many summers, right where the apartments my big brother now lives in was erected.

Years ago, now, I read Richard Rhodes' first-rate 1989 book Farm: A Year In The Life Of An American Farmer, and came to grips with how little useful information I really had at my disposal, how few skills I had. Perhaps that was why I began slowly to collect power tools, and to lose my fear of them (there had been an altercation with a chainsaw the summer before I entered eighth grade), or perhaps it was some latent impulse passed on from my maternal grandfather, who died one summer night when I was five, but not before teaching me to drive a nail straight.

Grandpa Shillington had only daughters, but he taught my mom to drive a nail and not to fear tools, so she did some of the finishing work on our basement in the suburbs. My dad has many skills and knows many arcane things, but carpentry is not among them.

During my 16-month exile in Los Angeles, when I finally got shed of Seattle -- and only the dire need of a job and a way out of debt pried me loose from the place I'd sought to leave and then stubbornly refused to abandon during my twenties and thirties -- I found my co-workers mystified that I'd thought to move down with my few tools, and that I'd chosen my apartment as much for its gas stove as for its neighborhood.

All of which is a winding way toward mentioning that we spent most of last week in Chicago, visiting old friends from Nashville, quaffing exotic beer, eating at some of our friends' favorite places on the North Side (and I would particularly commend the cuisine and the beer at the Hop Leaf).

Ordinarily I'd have said I was a city boy, my suburban pedigree to the contrary, and despite the fact that I spent many of the grunge years in a weird exile in a Federal Way tract home 20 miles from the center of anything, even Tacoma. I despise lawns and lawnmower and especially weedeaters. I learned none of my mother's knack for growing things, though, in the end, having sat and watched her cook all those years served better than I'd have imagined while playing solitare on the kitchen table.

But riding the train into Chicago from Midway, walking and listening to the streets, waking and sleeping and attending to the sounds of a strange place, I found that I have begun to lose the ability to make a big city feel natural. I used to go to New York often enough that I could order coffee, ride the subways and, after, half a day, walk at the right pace, know when to cross the streets, and carry myself slightly coiled enough to pass for somebody who belonged there.

Now, I like Chicago. It is the one city we once vaguely imagined we might live in when we sat around talking about where, other than Nashville, we might wish to be. And the Art Institute, though we skipped it this time, is the first major museum I ever visited, and remains among my very favorite places to spend a day. Instead, we moved back to Susan's home in eastern Kentucky, to a small university town without a single good beer on draft and no regular venues for live music.

To a place where I really am a city kid, where tools are expected and the retired doctor knows more about compost than we ever will.

I finally finished Barbara Kingsolver's new book one morning in Chicago, and listened anxiously each day for word of our daughter's happiness and good conduct in our absence, and for updates in the ongoing battle against the Japanese beetles. (Which both sides seem to be winning; they're lacing the upper leaves on the greasy beans, but the beans themselves seem to be flourishing. It's probably a race, but the season of the beetle runs only a couple more weeks and a draw will do.)

In any event, I was struck by how newly fragile the big city seemed to me: How few places there were, especially in the era of urban in-fill, where things might grow; How difficult it might be to house an amateur's collection of power tools there, much less use them, much less find wood in the neighborhood hardware stores; How much different the rituals of space and privacy are; How many people were willfully isolated on the street by their iPod or their cellphone; How little difference ethnic diversity makes if nobody troubles to interact.

By how many people would be trapped like rats in a cage if something bad happened in Chicago.

Which is to say that I felt vaguely confined, that I have come to need the space afforded by our life here in the middle of what is meant to be nowhere (and isn't, but you can get there from here), that I like being around things that grow (even if I'm not much use in aiding the process), and that there is something both inherently human and wonderfully nurturing in living where everybody seems to know both your troubles and your triumphs.

Back in the 1980s I was much moved by Godfrey Reggio's film, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word translated as "life out of balance." I suppose its message and time-lapse photography has become a bit of a new age cliche today, and it's been years since I've viewed the movie.

But I'll keep hunting for that balance. Right after I get a handle on the incredibly messy office I came home to, and all the mail I still haven't opened.

Posted by grant on July 15, 2007 9:53 AM | Permalink