Suburbia: The Perfect Starter for the Sourdough of Life

Every Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and all other holidays where stuffing your face with festively-spiced carbohydrates is appropriate, thousands of Long Islanders flock to the Milleridge Inn for overpriced five-course meals served by Spanish waiters in a dilapidated building. The charm is obvious; it's not a real Christmas without the Milleridge, you see -- not without the faux-copper pots hanging above the real fireplace that dates back to the Revolutionary War era, or the real exposed wooden beams -- look, they're even crooked! That means they're old. 

Before I came to Europe, the oldest thing I'd seen outside of a museum was the Milleridge Inn. 

Like most Long Islanders, I appreciated any building that was not made out of plywood, cement, or asphalt. The Milleridge boasted real wooden shingles and a massive brick fireplace; I fell in love. The building possessed more years of dusty (and probably bloody) history than did any building I'd seen as a child. 

Of course, I've since seen some honest-to-god old buildings in Quebec City with Madame Vert's French class of '99; in Oxford and London with my mother; and in France, everywhere. But simply looking at these buildings is besides the point -- what makes the centuries-old cathedrals of France different from the Milleridge Inn is not their annual tourism revenue (which is probably about the same, considering what the Milleridge charges per plate), but their normalcy. 

Churches, fountains, cobblestone roads, and town halls, scattered shamelessly across Europe for all pedestrians and motorists to underappreciate. Going to la boulangerie? Make a right at the Gothic cathedral, follow the tiny road that's too small to fit a SmartCar, and pass under the 12th-century bridge, you'll see it in the old Roman bath building. I know, it's a real pain to get to; I just buy my bread at Monoprix. 

I appreciate neither the giddiness of Long Islanders, nor the blasé attitude of the French. You're missing half the world in both cases, either because you're too busy staring at the handmade musket replicas to notice the scenery, or because you're not looking at all. And this is why I'm glad that I grew up in suburbia. 

During my travels in Provence, I noticed a pattern in the way I would respond (physically, emotionally, intellectually, fastidiously) to each impressively-aged batiment. Without fail, I would smile a little, take a breath, and feel a physically refreshing sense of childlike wonder pass through my body, imbued with the appreciation of an adult. It's quite a nice feeling. 

I felt this when I first saw le Palais des papes in Avignon; when I saw the tiny, twisted streets of Aix-en-Provence for the first time; when I saw the Roman amphitheatre in Arles; when I realized that the garden in the back of the monastery at La Chartreuse in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon was still a fully functional kitchen garden (complete with almonds, limes, persimmons, oranges, olives, and roses!). 

I owe my sense of appreciative wonder to my completely average and thus fantastic background. [I'm using the word average in its literal sense, and without pejorative connotation.] Levittown, true to its roots, is an utterly average place. It's relatively close to the beach, the mountains, and the city; the houses are basically the same size; there is no great disparity between classes; the schools are decent; crime is relatively low, but not nonexistent. In the opinion of a person who is still young and has traveled only a little in her lifetime and is open to disagreement with this statement, Levittown is one of the most average places I have come ever across. 

I have been nourished, educated, and socialized just enough -- the perfect amount -- and in a modern context (meaning, with average exposure to technology). I've never been truly hungry, cold, or unhappy, nor have I ever gone on lavish vacations, eaten at a five-star restaurant, or gotten whatever I've asked for. Located at exactly the middle of the American social and economic spectrum, my life as a child was essentially a blank slate, perfectly capable of ascension or descension. (Or, as many choose, stagnation. Suburbia can be a dangerous place when it happens to people who are a bit too content to rest on their laurels.) 

Thus, my constant smiling and gasping. My purely mediocre upbringing has allowed me to view the world with the eyes of someone who is very slightly experienced, enough to be familiar with most things in life without ever becoming either overwrought with wonder, or bored. Churches? Yeah, I know what those are, but I've never seen one like that. 

Perhaps this all has nothing to do with my suburban upbringing. Perhaps I'm playing down the individual importance of family life, friends, personal level of intelligence, genetics, and so on. But how well can you thrive if you're never given access to the proper tools for maturation, like nature, books, colors, music? Or, at the opposite extreme, given so many tools that you're never given the chance to challenge yourself? 

Wouldn't you prefer the chance to take your middling education, your public swimming pools and dingy town library, and turn them into something great? 

The world is and always will be my oyster. 

....................

"One of [the brain's] functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, and turn the unusual into the usual -- because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big, stupid grins; they'd say "wow!" a lot. Part of the brain wants to stop this from happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels." 

-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods