When I was growing up, I thought the best place to live would be the suburbs. For me, that meant anywhere on Long Island beyond the edge of Queens. Anyplace where our neighbor’s kitchen window was more than six feet from our kitchen window. Someplace with a little green space, nice neighbors and a place to park a car. Someplace where we didn't have to avoid certain streets to avoid getting jumped.

By the time my family made the move, I was nineteen and almost living on my own. To my surprise, I felt like we just moved to Jupiter. People still had heads, bodies, arms and legs but beyond that, they were so different. They were certainly friendlier than the neighbors we left behind, but they didn’t seem to share any of the same interests we had. In my old neighborhood, fathers brought their kids to baseball or hockey games if they wanted to go out. More often than not, many of our fathers worked on Saturdays and couldn’t bring us anywhere. We followed the quaint notion of taking ourselves to our friends’ houses and maybe going for bike rides, playing ball or other kid stuff.

Other nineteen year-olds in this new neighborhood grew up in organized activities, organized sports, even organized breathing and were still going down that road. They didn't just go out for a beer or hang out in a yard, they got together to play a round of golf at the county park. Nineteen year-old guys talked to each other, comparing their “Big Bertha” clubs. At first I thought Big Bertha was a large, aggressive neighborhood girl. I thought of golf as something old guys watched on television. It was pretty weird. I expected to see Ozzie and Harriet riding down the street in a golf cart. For those few years I was still with my parents, I felt lost in the suburbs and wanted nothing more than to move back to the city. It didn’t matter where, as long as it was in the city.

Now thirty years later, I’m back in the suburbs with my wife and two kids. It’s changed since my parents first moved here. Back then, there were pros and cons to moving here, with the pros outweighing the cons. Long Island in the 21st Century has kept the cons from that earlier time and discarded the pros. It’s even taking on some of the cons we thought we left in Queens, like drugs, gangs and deteriorating schools. If I had the means to move next week, I wouldn’t move further east onto the Island but west, back into the city.

As I write this, I think of my friend who lives with her husband and daughter on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She’s one of those extremely rare people who was born in Manhattan and has lived there her entire life. Almost everybody else there seems to have moved there at some point after they were already on their own. after As I sit here writing about my desire to move back into the city, she’s trying to escape it by moving to New York’s Connecticut suburbs. Her big dream is to find a nice, one family house within commuting distance of her job in Manhattan, but far enough away to forget the city when she gets home.

We’ve talked about this a dozen times so far. I’ve tried to convince her that suburban life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and she’s better off in the city. She doesn’t drive, so I told her she’d better be prepared for isolation. If you can’t drive to a Costco, you’d better be ready to fast. Even something as simple as a deli or 7/11 might be half a mile away. Her answer is that she’s already isolated in Manhattan; at least her surroundings will be nicer.

How about suburban schools? They’re not as great as people think. She knocks that one out of the park by reminding me she’s talking about NYC schools here. I concede that one to her. If she sends her daughter to a private elementary school in Manhattan, she has to pay more than twice as much as I did to go away to college.

Pulling out my trump card, I mention how my kids, whom we adopted, are an ethnic minority of two in our 98% white neighborhood. At least the city is home to people from every corner of the Earth. That’s true she said, but her neighbor-hood is one of those corners. It used to have people from all over but now, the Lower East Side is almost all Chinese immigrants. She and her family are not ethnic Chinese, they don’t speak or read Chinese and they don’t understand Chinese customs. I rip my trump card up. My kids may stand out ethnically, but culturally, they’re at least thoroughly Americanized.

Next time we talk, maybe I’ll propose a swap. For the next year, she can move her family out to my house in the idyllic suburbs and we’ll move to her apartment in the luxurious city. My bet is that by the end of the year, when our lawn is two feet high and her neighbors can’t take any more of our noise, neighbors will either drive us all back to where we came from or we’ll run out the doors as fast as we can, passing each other in a blur as we run back home.

Technorati Profile