once launched it just stuck there in the solar system’s firmament like a dart in the ceiling. Maybe it metamorphosed into one of my father’s pretty satellites with the glittery solar panels. That the Polaris was so obviously the future exploding out of the sea seemed reason enough to create it.
My mother gave me her own pictures, Catholic holy cards, Virgin Mary visitations, saints aglow, Christ baring His Sacred Heart while floating up in the clouds. And so airfoils and angel wings, blastoffs and holy ascensions, Our hovering Lady of Fatima, her cloaked contour so
aerodynamic
—all of these images, my father’s and my mother’s—mingled in my child’s mind to form a coherent iconography. An empty space was not so hard a thing to fill up if you were determined to see in it what you wanted.
That, my mother and father will tell you, is how they remember their brand-new tract home in their brand-new subdivision: as a certain perfection of potentiality. Nowadays, when suburbia is often disparaged as a “crisis of place” cluttered with needless junk and diminished lives, it is worth considering that it was not suburbia’s
stuff
that drew people like my parents to such lands in the first place, but the emptiness. A removed emptiness, made safe and ordered and affordable. An up-to-date emptiness, made precisely for us.
“We never looked at a used house,” my father remembers of those days in the early 1960s when he and my mother went shopping for a home of their own in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. “A used house simply did not interest us.” Instead, they roved in search of balloons and bunting and the many billboardsadvertising
Low Interest! No Money Down!
to military veterans like my father. They would follow the signs to the model homes standing in empty fields and tour the empty floor plans and leave with notes carefully made about square footage and closet space. “We shopped for a new house,” my father says, “the way you shopped for a car.”
Whenever I think of the house they bought and the development surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are of an ascetic barrenness to the streets, the lots, the rooms. The snapshots confirm it: There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard, shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake, in the background nothing but unplanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco and open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation.
“Didn’t the sterility scare the hell out of you?” I’ve asked my mother often. “Didn’t you look around and wonder if you’d been stuck on a desert island?”
The questions never faze her. “We were thrilled to death. Not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone!”
Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door, a family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables like our own, reflections of ourselves multiplying all around us in our new emptiness. Having been given the emptiness we longed for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.
Listen, listen … look around … must be found.
W e were blithe conquerors, my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image, we did so with a smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first we would establish a few outposts—a Pentagon-funded researchuniversity, say, or a bomber command center, or a missile testing range—and then, over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before us. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to some place like the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we did not cause panic in the
My mother gave me her own pictures, Catholic holy cards, Virgin Mary visitations, saints aglow, Christ baring His Sacred Heart while floating up in the clouds. And so airfoils and angel wings, blastoffs and holy ascensions, Our hovering Lady of Fatima, her cloaked contour so
aerodynamic
—all of these images, my father’s and my mother’s—mingled in my child’s mind to form a coherent iconography. An empty space was not so hard a thing to fill up if you were determined to see in it what you wanted.
That, my mother and father will tell you, is how they remember their brand-new tract home in their brand-new subdivision: as a certain perfection of potentiality. Nowadays, when suburbia is often disparaged as a “crisis of place” cluttered with needless junk and diminished lives, it is worth considering that it was not suburbia’s
stuff
that drew people like my parents to such lands in the first place, but the emptiness. A removed emptiness, made safe and ordered and affordable. An up-to-date emptiness, made precisely for us.
“We never looked at a used house,” my father remembers of those days in the early 1960s when he and my mother went shopping for a home of their own in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. “A used house simply did not interest us.” Instead, they roved in search of balloons and bunting and the many billboardsadvertising
Low Interest! No Money Down!
to military veterans like my father. They would follow the signs to the model homes standing in empty fields and tour the empty floor plans and leave with notes carefully made about square footage and closet space. “We shopped for a new house,” my father says, “the way you shopped for a car.”
Whenever I think of the house they bought and the development surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are of an ascetic barrenness to the streets, the lots, the rooms. The snapshots confirm it: There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard, shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake, in the background nothing but unplanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco and open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation.
“Didn’t the sterility scare the hell out of you?” I’ve asked my mother often. “Didn’t you look around and wonder if you’d been stuck on a desert island?”
The questions never faze her. “We were thrilled to death. Not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone!”
Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door, a family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables like our own, reflections of ourselves multiplying all around us in our new emptiness. Having been given the emptiness we longed for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.
Listen, listen … look around … must be found.
W e were blithe conquerors, my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image, we did so with a smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first we would establish a few outposts—a Pentagon-funded researchuniversity, say, or a bomber command center, or a missile testing range—and then, over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before us. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to some place like the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we did not cause panic in the
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