Moving Eastward

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life has been influenced by where I grew up.

I'm the daughter of a nurse and a high school English teacher-turned-administrator. They moved into the house I grew up in when I was a little under a year old. They picked it because it was close to the best healthcare and in the same district as the best public schools, and because it was safe and suburban and the kind of place where you want your kids to grow up.

For eighteen years, I lived in a city that only became a city the year before I was born, in a house that was "old" for the area because it had been built in the 1970s. I lived in a community that depended on cars and scoffed at public transportation, where the hum and rush of traffic along the 5 freeway was ubiquitous the way the sound of waves is to people who live along the shore. I lived in the kind of suburban city that is no longer even a suburb of anywhere, except for the suburbs themselves. The closest major city was Los Angeles, all spread out and gleaming and so emphatically and insistently new, but even LA was an hour away, and for eighteen years, I probably spent 90% of my time within a fifteen-mile radius of home.

My parents grew up within that radius. When my mother was in high school, her family hosted an Italian exchange student. Mom remembers showing Beatrice all the sights around where she lived, but specifically, she remembers showing her to Mission San Juan Capistrano. Founded by the Spanish in 1776, when much of California was under their control, it's one of the oldest things there is around here. Mom had always found it pretty impressive, but seeing it with Beatrice, she realized how strange it must seem to a girl who grew up just outside of Rome that the oldest thing around was just over two hundred years old.

The American dream, for better or for worse, is about conquering new places and building new lives. As a culture, we're still dealing with the myth of the west as a grand frontier, the newest part of the New World, the place where you go to remake yourself. But it doesn't seem that way to someone who's grown up there. Aside from intermittent travels and nine months spent studying in London, I've lived my whole life on the west coast of the United States, and somewhere along the line, being surrounded by so much that was "new" just got old.

For a while, I've wanted something very different. I want to live at a center of things, a place to which everyone feels connected by a depth of history almost unimaginable from the perspective of a southern California suburb. I want, not the movement to the unexplored and uncharted, but to trace my steps back across the American plains and to the cities where my ancestors first landed on this continent -- back even further, across the Atlantic Ocean to the ports of Europe, where once those same ancestors mingled and shared a cigarette or two before boarding the ships that would take them across this bridge of water to a new world. I don't want the new world, having grown up with it. I want to reclaim some of what is old, some of what lasts.

Moving to New York seems like a twentysomething's rite of passage. (After all, hasn't American television taught us that everything that's anything happens in New York City?) But for me, it's more than that. It's about reversing the movement west, the movement to the new. It's not about leaving something behind me, but getting something back. And I wonder: if you grow up on the edge of things, in the place that used to be a frontier, the place where the American Dream ends, how is your cultural narrative different because of it? I grew up in the west. Maybe that's why I feel so much destiny in moving east.