Monday Musings: "You are my WIFE...GOODBYE City Life!"

Monday, January 19, 2009

According to this article, city-life may actually impair your mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is apparently less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. Ironically, though, the same aspects of city-life that dampen your ability to think clearly and live a healthy life are strongly correlated with innovation and creativity. Do we have to choose?

When i moved to Chicago from New York, it would annoy me to no end that most dinner parties would include some comparison of the two cities. Why was it a good thing that the new Moroccan restaurant seemed "so New York" and that the Picasso exhibit at the Institute of Art was "just as good" as the MOMA exhibit a few years back? I chalked it up to a "second city" inferiority complex and was happy to dismiss it and focus on all the amazing sites and sounds Chicago had to offer. When I left Chicago for San Francisco, I was faced with a different facet of the same conversation: The never-ending "East Coast/West Coast debate." San Francisco is so hippie. New York is so dirty. San Francisco has natural beauty. New York has actual culture. People--myself included, much as I would try to stay away from it--could and did and do discuss the merits of SF versus New York ad nauseam, with the passion and fury of the sort of lover's quarrel that exhibits the sliver thin line between agony and ecstasy, love and hate.

We love our cities like we love people.

The newest wrinkle of the "Great City" debate occurred when my husband and I left San Francisco for Berkeley. Technically a suburb of San Francisco, Berkeley is a far-cry from the suburban life I grew up with. Locals and transplants (my husband considers himself part of the latter group while I still feel like an interloper) wax profound about the University atmosphere, the amazing food, the colorful people. And all of these things are true. But this litany of pro-Berkeley propaganda often ends with the phrase "and it's so close to the city." Because, despite everything Berkeley has going for it--and I really do love living here--it just is not San Francisco.

I was thinking about it this weekend. City life. Why so many of us are so mesmerized by it, we so many of us sought it out as soon as we were allowed to be out past 10pm. The newest iteration of the "city conversation" at the parties I frequent no longer compares metropolises in which we have lived, but involves starry-eyed couples dreaming and scheming ways to return to the cities. Some of the couples have little babies and are duking it out with the stroller brigades in places like Noe Valley, vowing to stay in the city almost as if discussing a duty they hold...as long as they find "acceptable schools." 99% of these people will leave San Francisco in the next year. The majority of the dreamers are couples like me and my husband, who left San Francisco (or New York, or Chicago) soon after having kids, pulled by the age-old, pregnancy-triggered need for greenery and space. (According to the article, one of the main reasons city-dwellers experience diminished intellectual ability is the "stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard.") Then of course there are the nay-sayers. The couples who proclaim that they miss nothing about city-life and breath sighs of relief as they pass by the urban jungle in their "baby on board"ed cars, en route to their bucolic oasis 15 miles away. But you know what? I only know one couple like this. And they are liars.

The article dances around what I and so many people find so amorphous and yet miss so much: The palpable energy city-life offers. When you dissect it, it doesn't make any sense. I don't really need to see the make-shift jazz band on the corner of Powell and Geary after seeing John Guare's revival of "Rich and Famous." I don't feel a void in my life due to the fact that, when I walk around in Berkeley in the evenings, the streets are not buzzing with the animation of packs of teenagers, and homeless people declaring "My Mickey balloon had a few Coronas." (That happened on Friday night). And, as a parent, I don't envy the kids fighting for spots on the swings, the moms jockeying for slots in the "coveted" preschools.

And yet...

When we were in SF Friday night (after seeing the new John Guare revival and stopping to listen to the make-shift jazz band on the corner for a second), I found the words spilling from my mouth for the millionth time: "Let's move back here," I said, holding my husband's hand, almost imagining him whisking me away to a small and absolutely family-unfriendly apartment in the sky.

But I recognize I am of two minds. The city article gives a new explanation to the calm and serenity that envelopes me as I make the 5 minute drive up the hill to my house in Berkeley. Maybe the trees and foliage and green are doing their work, I don't know. I never expected to be the sort of person whose actual demeanor changes as I almost automatically go through the banal motions that take me back home. But something happens as I leave my city job and my city life for the bigger part of my world, perched on top of that hill, in my house in the Berkeley hills. Something transformative. I shed the desire and the want and the searching that is so much a part of my life at the bottom of the hill (and that, make no mistake, will be waiting for me, like a hitchhiker, in the morning). I drive the windy roads, still audibly gasping at times at the vistas that unfold in front of me. I feel myself slowing down. And I climb and climb, incapable of preventing the smile that automatically starts to spread, anxious to see the faces waiting for me behind my decidedly un-hip, suburban door.


(Thanks Ayesha for the article!)
12 comments:
Anonymous said...

I am guilty of this! Constnatly bemoaning the cities we have left while at the same time being happy about where we are. I think nostalgia gets the better of me sometimes.

Anonymous said...

haha have to admit that when i find myself saying that i don't miss the city (nyc in my case) a part of my is lying! nice piece.

Anonymous said...

This confirms what I have always thought about people who crave "city life": You would all benefit from a trip to a farm. Seriously, what is so great about noise, pollution, crowds? I've never understood it.

Anonymous said...

I think as parents "city life" takes on new meaning too no? I find myself wanting to expose my kids to "real" life, not the little utopias we set up for them in the suburbs. But of course I am no different and fled the city when my first born was almost 1.

Anonymous said...

this is a really beautiful piece of writing! and maybe i am going to sound dense but can't you live in the suburbs and still take advantage of the city?? of course i'ts not exactly the same but what is after kids.

laughed out loud at the "green acres" reference. haven't thought of that show in ages!

Anonymous said...

would have bet money you guys would be writing about the inauguration or at least MLK day today. what's the word?

Anonymous said...

I thought I was the only one who has gotten fed up with the incessant, same-old-same-old chatter about new york versus chicago versus san francsico! enough already there are more important things to discuss. (Plus--hehe--the place to be these days is D.C. anyway!)

Anonymous said...

Super interesting article and study. Particularly liked the part about how urban design can bridge the sensory gap between suburbs and cities. It's nice to imagine our kids one day having the best of both worlds.

Anonymous said...

I live in Chicago and it makes my skin crawl how much everyone here compares us and our culture to New York all the time! I hope I get to see the phrase "second city" die in my lifetime (though the comedy is pretty amazing!) Chicago actually has been a great place to raise kids and I am glad I stuck it out when all my friends started to flee. They all get very envious now that our kids are a little bit older and they are stuck in the boonies. We make compromises and it takes some planning but city life with kids is doable and, in my opinion, preferable.

Anonymous said...

Oh you don't know how lucky you are. Berkeley is essentially like NYC to us, stuck in the middle of Rhode Island for my husband's teaching gig. We are city people. I know people roll their eyes at that but we are. We like to eat out at cafes, see what is at the museum, center our days around what the sidewalk may offer. We don't like to have to drive everywhere, look out the windown and see nobody for days, listen to the echo of silence. Berkeley would be a dream for us, so count your blessings even if they don't include San Francisco! Do you eat at Chez Panisse everyday, tell me you do. Haha.

Anonymous said...

I think I must be the only person I know who doesn't crave my former city life. Maybe because I married later, and had my children later, I feel like I was very much ready for the next thing. City life IS trying. I am happy without the stress of getting from Point A to Point B and I think that some distance allows you to pick and choose what aspects of the city you really care about (For us that means cultural things like museums for our kids).

Anonymous said...

You must be at the same parties we're at! I hope it's just a phase and that we all start to talk about more interesting things soon. Obviously I'm kidding in part but at the end of the day we've all made choices and many of us have ended up out of the cities we so love, so I think we should just deal with it, move on, accept it. Or move back, no?

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