A Supposedly Fun Thing I Never Thought I’d Do

Back in my “wild” days, my friends and I used to hang out at a dank little coffeehouse called Paris on the Platte.  It was at the outskirts of LoDo, a 25-minute drive from the suburban wasteland where I lived, and had all the dissolute elements that made it attractive to a fifteen-year-old wannabe rebel: waiters with piercings, a thick fug of smoke hanging over the tables, and an attached bookstore selling battered copies of On The Road.

Paris on the Platte, back in the day.

If you go there now, you’ll find a different sort of place.  A few years ago they jumped on the yuppie bandwagon, turning the bookstore into a wine bar, firing the pierced people, and getting up to code with Colorado’s new smoking ban.  But in 1994 none of this had happened yet.  One of the most alluring features was the tobacco bar at the bookstore counter.  It was filled with what, to me, were objet exotique, packages that called to mind a far away land:  Djarums, cigarillos, bidis, Sampoernas and Gudang Garams. I was around sixteen at the time, so for me clove cigarettes were actually illegal, which of course only added to their allure and necessitated flirtatious interactions with older tattooed boys who could procure them.

You mean they're illegal AND they come in different colors? Be still my teenage heart!

My friends and I would sit at our grotty little table, ordering cappuccino after cappuccino, holding our cloves casually between our fingers and reveling in how utterly, completely cool we finally were.  Everything about the experience was cool:  the crackle of the carcinogenic cloves and the tobacco, the dirty-hippie aroma, the way the smoke curled up around our faces and partially obscured our glasses and Claw bangs.

Yeah, we looked cool. Kinda like this woman.

More than once, I told my friends that I was never ever ever going to stop smoking cloves. It was a part of who I was, man.  No One Would Ever Take My Identity Away From Me. I remember these conversations vividly, probably because I was completely earnest.  I felt the sort of deep belief in my clove habit that only a teenager can feel; I felt it in my stomach, where my intestines churned with passion–or possibly coffee.

I was thinking about this a few days ago when I was cleaning out our kitchen junk drawer and found a stale package of Sampoernas smashed in the back, next to a dried out Glue Stick and the 2006 Somerville visitor parking permit.  The cloves were at least five years old; Alexis and I had bought them on a whim when she was visiting me.  We had sat outside and each smoked 1/4 of one, marveling at how unpleasant they now seemed to us.  Despite this, I never had the heart to throw them away, and had in fact carried them from the junk drawer in my previous rental to the condo where we live now.

It turns out that I’m a person of strong convictions which I almost always discard–in fact, the stronger the conviction, the more likely I am to cast it off.  I will never stop smoking cloves.  I will never get married.  I will never take a lot of gear with me when I go car camping because gear’s for pussies. I will never have children. I will never date someone who’s not a smelly mountain man. I will never stop drinking wine.   I will never live in the suburbs.

So here I am, almost 34, and going through the above list, it appears that the only vestiges of my former personality that I have left are  loving wine and living in an urban area.  Whee!  Way to know yourself, Whitney!

The most frustrating, or perhaps disappointing, thing is that all of the convictions I discard along the way are the things that end up making me the happiest: I love being married, I love my kid, I love being able to take a deep breath without a sharp pain in my lung.  The frustrating piece is that I’ve spent so much time and energy on the convictions–I’m apparently very invested in not knowing what will make me happy.  I envy those people who have always known what they want: the veterinarians and astronauts and girls who knew they wanted to be moms when they were five.  It must be nice to have your vision of yourself line up with reality so neatly, and I sometimes wonder why mine doesn’t.

I actually still feel pretty strongly that I will never camp with something like this.

This is all a very long way of getting to my point, which is that Ryan and I are contemplating moving, and it’s scaring the s*#t out of me.  Turns out that our urban paradise has one of the crappiest school districts in Massachusetts, and like all parents before us, we want our kid to go to a good school.  But good schools necessitate a move to the heretofore dreaded suburbs.  Of all my convictions, this one may be the strongest.  I hated growing up in the sterile neighborhood that we moved to when I was in fourth grade.  I hated the big box superstores and the chain restaurants, and I sensed that my parents hated it too, that they missed the tiny brick house near Washington Park where I was born.  My whole life, I’ve thought that I would do anything I could to avoid that fate, and if I had kids, they’d be happier wandering the streets and alleys of a real city than they would be if they were safe and secure in suburbia.

Yeah.  And now here we are, and I find myself yearning a bit for some green space for Lydia.  For trees and a little single family home with an actual yard.  For a street that she could ride her bike on. A neighborhood where she could actually go outside and play without–gasp!–constant adult supervision.

Plus, it dawned on me recently that I can’t imagine childhood any other way.  We’ve got to give her something to break away from, a place that she can define herself against–somewhere she can leave to go smoke clove cigarettes.  So we’re looking (well, really I’m looking) at endless MLS listings and we may move in a year or two.  And then, suburbified, who will I be?

Maybe, like all these other choices I didn’t think I wanted to make, living in the suburbs will be awesome.  And at least I’ll still have wine. Realistically, there’s probably a really nice wine bar in whatever suburb we end up in, so that’s something.

My once and future home?

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