Sweet Disarray

I'm on a Mister Rogers kick right now, if that isn't yet obvious to everybody yet.

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This morning I took the boys for a walk around our neighborhood. We are moving on Friday, away away away to the suburbs, away from the city and its comfortingly noisy buzz and beautifully unpredictable people. I brought my camera along hoping to capture some of the unexpected beauty of my urban neighborhood.

"Follow Blindly" reads the side of the desk, abandoned on the side of the curb like so much unwanted furniture in the neighborhood. It's been there for at least a couple of weeks.

The house on the corner that uses its front lawn as a flea market and found-item art sculpture garden. I quite like it, don't you?

A longshot of the corner kitchen utensil "flowers" and an approaching (and endlessly exciting) garbage truck.

The side of the house.

I'll miss the friendly owner of our local liquor store.

A lonely red rose stands proudly next to the stinky trash bins of an apartment complex. Our neighborhood has some surprisingly lovely flowers.

We've taken this walk dozens of times, usually ringing around a block or two before stopping at the local liquor store and grabbing a small box of animal crackers or goldfish, maybe stopping at the local deli for lunch. We all love these walks around our neighborhood. We say hi to the busy people walking their dogs. We pick up leaves and sticks and trample on other people's grass. We run through the "forest" (a cluster of small palm trees one apartment complex has planted in front of their building). We read the STOP signs and exclaim at the largeness of garbage trucks and laugh at all the dog poo. It's fun!

But today, I don't know why, but it was not fun. At least, not for me. With the specter of suburbia hovering over my imagination, I couldn't help but notice how different our walks will be once we're no longer subject to the small daily annoyances of living in the city with children.

Our neighborhood gets relatively heavy traffic for a residential area; drivers use it in order to avoid the busy main thoroughfares or simply as a shortcut to the other side of town. I never let the children walk more than a driveway length ahead of me, knowing that they are too small for cars to see and that the children won't and can't look out for traffic. People backing out of carports or pulling into driveways don't look out for small people in their way, especially when those people can barely reach their bumpers.

Then there is the fact that nobody in our neighborhood seems to possess the courtesy to pick up their dog's stools. Of course, I'm not a pet owner, but I don't understand that kind of disregard. It seems like the most basic kind of respect for your community, to pick up your dog's crap. I did it all the time when I walked my grandmother's dog. It's not a big deal, really. But for whatever reason, people here don't do it. (There was a short period of time when some cranky neighborhood fairy godmother left tiny little colorful flags in the poop with messages like, "You're an ass!" and "Pick up your dog's shit!" and "How would you like it if I shit on your lawn?" I wish I had gotten a picture.)

Obviously, we're not the only ones who have an issue with the poop.

And yet, in true urbanite fashion, the response in pencil is, "F*** the Man!"

So I struggled today, like I usually do, to keep the children from walking into the street or tumbling down driveways that were more steep than playground slides or walking on any of the poop peppered grass. And it annoyed me. And, at the end of the walk I thought, "Thank God we are leaving this place. I'll finally be able to take walks without feeling like I have to tiptoe around my own neighborhood."

I feel guilty, somehow, like I've betrayed the Brotherhood of City Folk. Like I've suddenly become something I always promised I'd never be - a suburbanite. It's one thing to move to the suburbs reluctantly; it's another thing entirely to want to be there. I wonder to myself, "Was it really "white flight" that created Orange County and the Valley or was it people like me who just wanted to be able take a walk with their kids around the neighborhood without walking on shit and getting run over?" And then, like an unfaithful lover, I want to apologize to my beloved neighborhood: "I still love you, I do! It's not you! It's just, he can provide for me right now in a way that you can't. It's not your fault. I just need something different right now."

When C was young, all of this wasn't a problem; he was an unusually obedient child and it's only recently that he seems to have trouble curbing his newfound freewill to bend to my demands that he not walk in the street, stop at that driveway, run like a wild banshee on that patch of grass where OHHHHHH CRAP!

And K, my dear little boy of little impulse control and endless curiousity (much like a little monkey we all know), cannot seem to hear me solely when the words, "No!" or "Stop!" or "Please don't walk right there K! OHHHHHH CRAP!" come out of my mouth. (My grandmother suggested today that I leash him.) I had to carry him all the way home after we stopped at the deli this morning because he would not stay off the street, stop stepping on poop (or worse yet, touching it!...oh, how fascinating this brown sticky stuff is!), hold my hand and wait while somebody tried to back out of their driveway.

Now the two of them together are just more than I can handle on a simple walk around the block. It's worth it, I truly believe that, but I can't help looking forward to wide sidewalks and poop-free grassy curbs, a quiet street with people accustomed to children being underfoot, even a park (actually, two parks! TWO!) within easy walking distance. I'm sure it won't be nearly as interesting - no garden full of kitchen utensils or corner flea market house or neighborhood liquor store. But it will still have leave and sticks (the boys' favorite outdoor toys) and maybe I'll muster up the energy to take them out more, if only because I won't have to keep them quite so hemmed in. And I think that's something I shouldn't feel guilty about, wanting to let my children be children in their own neighborhood and still have them be safe and not covered in poo.