Learning #23: The 'Burbs are Nice

It's nice here.

It took my partner 5 full years to wrench me, kicking and screaming, out of Oakland and over the hill to tree-lined streets and cow-spotted hills and driveways full of little girls planting lavender.  These little girls planting lavender, who will stop what they're doing to announce to you from across the street, "We're planting lavender!" because they're so excited about it, are the same little girls that will wave to you while dangerously taking a hand off a wobbly handlebar, and the ones that will show up, unannounced, to "Boo" you at Halloween with anonymous candy and a ghostly note, telling you to pay it forward by leaving another neighbor some unexpected treats.

And that's, you know, nice.

If I really think about it, actually, it took my partner 5 full years to not pry me out of Oakland.  But it took my baby 5 whole months.

I have traditionally liked to think of myself as a City Person.  Yes, I too grew up in a tree-lined suburb wherein bikes were ridden and sleepovers were had and rollerskating to a friend's house was just a good way to get there and orange fights through the fence meant that Boys Lived There.  The more entrepreneurial children erected lemonade stands and, in the case of my sister, went door-to-door in costume with a friend, singing for tips and/or selling her personal belongings. (Thank you, Mr. Bardge, and here's a pocket dictionary.)

And the thing is, it was completely safe for my 7-year-old sister to be ringing random doorbells in the neighborhood, and for me to ride my bike a couple miles to a sleepover, or a mile to the store to blow my allowance on Big League Chew and Jolly Ranchers.

Living in Oakland, I was generally alarmed to see small kids riding their bikes unsupervised.  And there is no way I'd have my 7-year-old going door-to-door, either.  But I'm not 10, and I liked being able to walk to the Fox theater and cruise 10 minutes in pretty much any direction for amazing food, which by the way is one of the awesomest things about Oakland, hands down.  The food.  Is.  Amazing.  There is no need to travel into San Francisco or Berkeley to eat - but if you want to, that's another awesome thing about Oakland.  It's close to lots of other cool cities.

And coming by way of San Francisco (after a brief stint in Marin, which was pretty but sleepy and somewhat removed from everything else but Marin), I actually thought of Oakland as the suburbs.  This is easier to do when you live in the hills, as I did for a spell.  Being next to the trails was nice, and Montclair is just lovely in general, if you like that hilly neighborhood thing (and I do): hills, views and Scrub Oak.  And quiet.  But, after a time, it was just a little too quiet.

So down to the flats I went, still thinking that I was in the 'burbs even though I was living behind the Grocery Outlet parking lot.  But, see, I had a lot of oak trees seeing as how I lived next to a creek, and the house was an 1898 Victorian, and that seemed pretty suburban to me.

It was around the time that the drug dealer decided to take up residence in a van in front of our home, and the Oakland PD took 3 phone calls and as many days to show up about it even though he'd threatened my partner with an "I'm going to stick you!" as she approached his van (Worst Bad Guy line ever, really - points off for lameness), that I realized that I was living in a teeny-tiny bucolic micropod right smack in the middle of urban Oakland.  Which doesn't really count as the suburbs.

And this, strangely, made me feel better.  And more hip.  Because, even though I didn't live in San Francisco, I was actually still a City Person.   And Oakland is a big, big city, too - with big, big city problems, but hey - that's a city.  Us City People, we don't mind a little urban grit.  Grit is real.  It's nice that the homeless are raiding my recycling bins; that's industriousness along the lines of my sister guilting Mr. Barge into $5 for a pocket dictionary.

And so I told myself.

Until the baby was born.

Because now I was a Mom, and that deep, primal "The lions are around!" voice was telling me that the drunk guy on the corner was just freaking annoying, and the drug dealer in the parking lot behind us playing his siren song via the BOOMING bass so loud that it literally rattled our windows and sometimes woke up the baby was even more annoying (and calling the police on a non-violent crime is practically useless in Oakland, because the police force is way understaffed to be dealing with all of the violence, let alone the regular old non-violent crime), and the crackhead woman gesticulating wildly and mumbling to herself was a potential threat, because folks that are cracked out on God-Knows-What are known for doing God-Knows-What.  And the people raiding my recycle bins were suddenly a signal that, perhaps, this neighborhood might actually be considered kind of dicey, especially for a baby.

The thing about my neighborhood, though, is that I'd always thought of it as a "good-ish" neighborhood.  Sure, a car was stolen out of the driveway, and yes, a man had once been found on the front porch with a package of hot dogs trying to bribe the dogs for entry through the front window, and someone had actually stolen a bike and a camera out of our house once when we accidentally left the front door open, and someone else had stolen all my loose change and CD's out of my car (enjoy all the burned copies of Ani diFranco and Jason Mraz, dude; I'm sure they were a huge hit at the Laney flea market), and we did have that little incident with the neighborly gentleman who severely beat and tasered his wife in the driveway two doors down and in full view of their toddler, who Mom had wisely locked in the car before the attack, and someone was raped in the parking lot next door a couple years back, and there was the guy going all Omar-Little-style door-to-door with a shotgun, but without Omar's sense of decency, because this guy was just robbing the neighbors... but hey, that's the City, man.

And that was the problem.

--

The beginning of my house hunt started in Oakland, just in a different part of Oakland.  Like way, way up in the hills of Oakland since grit, like everything else, flows downhill.

And there were some pretty sweet spots up in the hills, with lovely views and trail proximity, and one house even had a view across the regional park system to what I now know is a trail in Moraga that I can (and do) now hike with the dogs to look across that same regional park system, and see that very house.

But there was another problem with Oakland, a problem that's also endemic to so many Big Cities, and that is: the schools.

Sure, we could move up to the top of a hill to a nice neighborhood.  But once the baby was in school, we'd have to drive her right back down to the urban plight that living up a hill lets one believe doesn't exist or affect them.

And so, we had to reprioritize again:  Nice neighborhood.  Nice neighbors.  Nice schools.

My partner put it this way: "Don't you want to live in a neighborhood where she can walk outside on Halloween and go Trick or Treating?"

Well, when you put it like that...

Because here's the thing: anyone who grew up in a suburb wherein it was safe and walkable and you knew your neighbors probably also has fond memories of getting together with all your friends in your costumes, and hitting the 'hood on Halloween to get as much candy as was humanly possible.  And hopefully, you know, that one house will have those full-sized Snickers again.

Sensing that I was hemming and hawing, she drove it home with "On Halloween we turn off all the lights, lock the doors, make sure the 'BAD DOGS' sign is on the front porch and we pretend we're not home."

True.

And so, finally, with memories of being dressed as a pair of dice with my friend Jenny (we made the costumes ourselves), I agreed to start looking for housing in the suburbs.

Good.  God.

--

It's been a year now since we moved to the sleepiest town I've lived in next to Fairfax, wherein the sidewalks roll up by 9 and the loudest neighbors we have are seasonal - it may be the cows, or it may be the frogs, or it may be the hawks screeeeeeching at each other and divebombing the crows (Spring has sprung!), or it may be that the three little girls next door are out of school now and playing outside a lot.

People recognize me at: the pizza place, the grocery store, the gym.  People who don't know me at all smile, and say hello.  The Lafayette Whole Foods is staffed with and patronized by people who will stop to admire my child, and engage her in a conversation, and life overall sort of feels like we're on an extended vacation - a feeling which is ever so much more vivid when I take a walk around my neighborhood and check out all the landscaping, in which folks around here seem to take a serious interest.

I recently left a bunch of stuff on the curb for the charity vans that routinely canvas my neighborhood, and they actually came up to the door to make sure the stuff was for charity, because I'd forgotten to affix the neon green "This is for Charity" tag.

In Oakland, putting stuff out for charity meant that, by morning, there was nothing left.  This was actually pretty convenient; you'd be amazed at the stuff that folks would just take off the street, including a huuuuuuge carboard box that had housed a nursing chair (and, truthfully, may have gone on to house a person).  The flip side of this is that, when I moved to the suburbs, I almost inadvertently stole a kid's basketball out of the street our first week here.

I mean, there was this ball, just sitting there in the gutter.  The Oakland in me went, "Score!  Basketball!"  But then I realized that the ball was under a hoop, and actually belonged to someone, and that I probably shouldn't be stealing the neighbor kid's ball.  A quick walk around my 'hood confirmed this - hoops, balls and toys everywhere.  And that's, you know, nice.

We have one park in walking distance with a soon-to-be-replaced play structure and another that's a 5-minute drive away.  That park just turned on a water feature that the kids play in, and we now run into the three little girls from next door, who have taken to packing an extra diaper in the bag Just In Case they run into us and we don't have one, because they like to make sure that my offspring can go into the water with them.  Nice.

The view from the front of the house affords me the pleasure of hills that change colors, and cows that change size.  The babies are loosed into the early Spring chill, fuzzy and adorable, and I've regrettably realized that my favorite Baby Cow, who I call Phantom of the Opera due to his markings, is most likely going to disappear next year when he's made into steak.

The view from my backyard is my own hillside with a cherry and walnut tree, a whole lot of mature ground cover, and an absolute shit-ton of blackberry, which is invasive and prickly and annoying and subject of an ongoing and probably futile battle involving me and a shovel.  However, the blackberry brings the birds skittering in and out of it to eat the fruit, and this both pleases the offspring and confuses our dimmest dog, who is then prone to pouncing into the plants to try to catch whatever is rustling around in there.  Entertainment for everyone.  And that's nice.

The light here is amazing.  I think it has something to do with the way it reflects off the hills.  And, for someone as aesthetically motivated as I am, that's really nice, too.

I can walk to open space in less than 10 minutes, and in 15 I'm in the middle of the cow pasture nestled in those hills I can see from my office and it's another 10 minutes or so to the lake, and the dogs absolutely love this trail, and you rarely ever see more than one person (if that) on the trail.  Though, in the Spring, you will see the high school track team running the trail, coupled off in cute boy-girl pairs.  And that's nice, too.

We have all sorts of wildlife here: birds (more kinds of birds than I've ever seen, and certainly more than I can identify), hawks, vultures, foxes, frogs, squirrels, raccoons (so I'm told), newts (the offspring loves those ambling newts), snakes, mice, voles, lizards, and deer everywhere.  I used to battle people leaving my freaking recycling bin open (which I solved by putting a sign on the top, requesting that they CLOSE IT); now I battle blackberry, poison oak, and deer eating everything in their migration path.

Sorry, jasmine.  Apparently you're too tasty to allow to flower in full here.  Ah, well; we have a local nursery, and they know my name, and my cousins supply them with azaleas, so we'll just have to find another deer-resistant plant to replace our beleaguered jasmine.

And these are the extent of the the neighborhood annoyances that I fight in Moraga.

And, shit, after all those years in Oakland, that's really nice.

So I feel like I live here now, and I'm not embarrassed about it anymore.   It may not be as hip, exciting and buzzy as Oakland, but then again I don't have to go on High Alert when the doorbell rings here, either...

...unless it's Girl Scout Cookie season, in which case I'm best off hiding if I ever want to get back into my hipster jeans.  In the meantime, you may mail me a pair of Mom Jeans.  I might even wear them.