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| THE FRONT PORCH | |
 June 28, 1999 
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SPOKESPERSON: There was screaming. I could hear girls screaming. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well before we heard the terrible news from suburban high schools, many Americans were wondering about the anonymity of the mall, and the wide streets with new homes where most people come and go by way of the garage. How to tell if one is in suburban Atlanta or Denver or Houston? Tom Wolfe, the novelist, remarks that the way one knows one has left one town and entered another is by the recurrence of chain store signage. But here, on 39th Street in Sacramento, half a block from Sacred Heart School, is where I grew up. I remember over there by the Toyota a tall Camellia bush standing next to the five steps of the front porch. And there by the Cadillac used to be our backyard. At this time of year, the apricot tree was always full. William Leach writes in "Country of Exiles" about the lost sense of place in today's America, so preoccupied are we with living in the global economy. But from our beginnings we have been a people in movement, more intent on the future than settling with the past. To that extent, we had more in common with a wanderer like Jack Kerouac than with a stay-at-home like Henry David Thoreau -- especially after the Second World War, when our parents could afford cars and there were highways to take them far from the city, we wanted an ideal that was also a compromise. We called it the suburbs. The suburbs, balanced green and gray, were close enough to work in the city, but far enough away to allow for sky and the scent of new-cut grass. The house in which I was raised was not in the suburbs; just half a mile from downtown; but the neighborhood was filled with restlessness. Most people had moved to Sacramento from elsewhere. Many came from the Midwest and spoke of terrible winters. They would move on, as my parents moved on, in several years, to another neighborhood. And by the early 1970's, in many parts of America, the balance had shifted. The city had lost to the suburb, which meant not only that the old department stores and movie theaters had closed, but also that traffic around the mall was more congested than in town. To get away from suburban congestion, the suburbanite was forced to move yet again, and again, until commutes of one or two hours became commonplace. Today the hot political topic spreading across the country is something called suburban sprawl. And something else is spreading. Call it a longing for those houses our parents left in the '50's. In Florida, the Walt Disney corporation builds a suburban town that resembles pre-war America. They call it "Celebration." On the outskirts of Sacramento, in Davis, California, suburbanites are moving into a neighborhood of new houses built close to the streets and to each other. There's something in us yearns to keep moving, seeking a greener future. In places like Davis, California, some other yearning is stirring for a neighborhood, for proximity, for a front porch. Houses create us as much as we create our houses. Every child knows this, maybe even better than the adult. We are shaped by rooms and ceilings. Windows are our eyes. Doors open our mouths to the street. I remember here -- the five steps to the front porch, the steps my father painted red, on summer afternoons like this one, sitting on the top step, watching the cars passing by, choosing my favorite cars, imagining my own mobility, someday. A few years after our family moved away, the house on 39th Street got torn down. The entire East side of the street, where the Jones lived and the Battels and the Hardings and old Mr. Newman, all the houses, and ours, disappeared for a parking lot for Mercy Hospital, rows of cars now where once there was an apricot tree in the backyard, the shiny Cadillac, where once I sat on the porch dreaming of my own car, someday. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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