By D.J. Waldie

I live where a majority of Americans live: a tract house on a block of other tract houses in a neighborhood of even more. My place is at the extreme southeast corner of Los Angeles County in a 957–square–foot house of wood frame and stucco construction put up hastily during the Second World War on dead–level farmland just far enough from a Douglas Aircraft plant so that bombs dropped by Japanese planes might miss it.

My parents bought this house in 1946, less than a year after the war ended, and they felt extraordinarily lucky. Maybe you wouldn’t regard a house like mine as a place of pilgrimage, but my parents did. Perhaps their one big move, from the Depression in New York and through the world war to California had been enough. Their lives afterward seemed to be about that, too – about the idea of enough. Their neighbors had the same idea. The critics later said that all suburban places were about excess. But they were wrong.

Despite everything that may have been ignored or squandered here, I believe a kind of dignity was gained. More men than just my father have said to me that living here gave them a life made whole and habits that did not make them feel ashamed. They knew what they found and lost. Mostly, they found enough space to reinvent themselves, although some men finally knew that their work had gone badly.

Urban planners tell me that my neighborhood was supposed have been bulldozed away years ago. Yet these small houses on small lots resist, loyal to an idea of how a neighborhood could be made.

There are plenty of toxic places in the gated enclaves and McMansion wastelands of America. They don’t have enough of the play between life in public and life in private that I see choreographed by design in my suburb. With neighbors just fifteen feet apart, we’re easily in each other’s lives, across fences, in front yards, and even through the thin stucco walls.

A Puritan strain in American culture is repelled by the look of where I live, and has been since a young photographer working for the Lakewood Park Corporation took a series of aerial photographs beginning in 1951 that look down on the vulnerable wood frames of the houses the company was putting up. Except you can’t see the intersection of character and place from an altitude of 500 feet.

I once thought my suburban life was an extended lesson in how to get along with other people. Now, I think the lesson isn’t neighborliness; it’s humility. When I stand at the end of my block, I see a pattern of sidewalk, driveway, and lawn that aspires to be no more than harmless. That’s important, because we live in a time of great harm to the ordinary parts of our lives, and I wish that I had acquired more of the resistance my neighborhood offers.

Where I live is one of the places where suburban stories were first mass–produced. They were stories then for displaced Okies and Arkies, Jews who knew the pain of exclusion, Catholics who thought they did, and anyone white with a steady job. Today, the same stories begin here, except the anxious people who tell them are completely mixed in their colors and ethnicities. I continue to live here because I want to find out what happens next in stories I think I already know.

Loyalty is the last habit that more sophisticated consumers would impute to those of us who live here; we’re supposed to be so dissatisfied in the suburbs. But I’m not unusual in living here for all the years I have. Perhaps like me, my neighbors have found a place that permits restless people to be still.

The primal mythmakers of California are its real estate agents, and one of them told me once that this suburb still attracts aspirant homebuyers because “it’s in the heart of the metroplex.” Maybe, it’s just in the heart.

I don’t know why this place is still adequate to my desire. It’s the setting for a story I want to hear told. It’s just the body into which I welcome myself.