Going home

Well, a funny thing happened right after I set up this blog to investigate my adopted home in the Inland Empire...

I spent the better part of week in NY, at a conference that was held about 7 miles from where I grew up and where my mom still lives in the house we lived in.

Levittown. My friends and I called it Leave-it-town. It is the original suburb -- designed by Sam Levitt to provide affordable housing for returning WWII vets. The center of Levittown is filled with Levitt houses... each house exactly the same on little square plots of land. The story is that when people first moved in, they'd often walk into their neighbors' houses, mistaking them for their own... that's how much alike everything was. My section of Levittown was built a little later... in my neighborhood, there are two kinds of houses: ranch, ranch, cape, ranch, ranch cape, ranch, ranch, cape....

We lived in a cape, next to a ranch on one side and an empty parking lot that eventually became a garden apartment complex.

Running through the center of the area, from the University I was visiting (Hofstra) to well past the turn for my mom's house, is a 6 or is it 8 lane street called Hempstead Turnpike... it is strip mall, fast food, gas station bleak. I had forgotten how ugly it is, how much I hate its retail insistence, its flatness, its mundanity. Is that a word? Looking at it, I suddenly realized how much like so many sections of So Cal it is... and it dawned on me why the IE felt oddly familiar when I moved here.