I've wanted to keep chickens for years.

I liked this idea, of neighbors taking down their interior fences to make a large communal backyard. I liked that idea more when I first proposed it in a ninth grade essay on how to improve cities, and I am sorry that it has taken so long for my early works to become influential. I’ve had time to reflect since that seminal essay, and I am no longer as sold on the idea. Combined backyards sounds like a small interior park, and while that is probably better than many even smaller pieces of turf, I think I want my parks to be larger and open to the public and have cooler play equipment than a bunch of neighbors can afford. Although, if a combined back yard meant that we could salvage and install those seriously high metal swings from our childhood, I would choose that over the pansy-ass, not-high-enough, brightly colored plastic swings you get in parks now.

Speaking of entirely inadequate swings for keeping children safe, this photo-essay* from Slate awakens all my unsubstantiated beliefs about how kids are raised these days. Lots of people in my age cohort clearly remember all sorts of freedom and autonomy of the “go play outside, be back for dinner and at dark” variety. Bill says his parents would be shocked at how far abroad he rode on his bike; Chris was free-range for sure; Margie said her Mom never knew where she was playing. It seems like people my age simultaneously want that for their kids and believe it isn’t possible. (Well, my friends’ kids are very young still.) I can’t figure out what is really stopping parents from that ‘turning their kids lose on the streets all evening’ existence that we grew up with. Combination of a culture of fear (unfounded – crime is down), societal pressure (no one else lets their kids out and they’ll say you’re the parent who doesn’t care if your kid gets snatched), poor urban design (not enough density, dangerous streets, and no adult eyes on front porches)? Chris lived in Santa Cruz (rich, white) and taught in Watsonville (poor, Mexican-American) and said that he’d never see kids on the streets in Santa Cruz, but that Watsonville was exactly like the ‘50s stereotypes of kids playing streetball all evening, every evening. Which makes me wonder if I would move my family to a poor ethnic neighborhood to provide that opportunity for my kids. Anyway, I watch my friends who think just like me act more protective than I think I would. I have to assume that when I feel those pressures, I’ll act like my friends are. But I don’t like it.

The final item in the theme of ‘lifestyles that I imagine for myself based on no real evidence’ is that I have wanted to live upstairs in a north-facing fourplex since I moved to Sacramento. These fourplexes are all over Midtown and the best of them have upstair balconies across both apartments. I want to live in one of those, despite the fact that I love my adorable little bungalow. Second story so I can walk around naked and street level people can’t see me! Drinking on an upstairs balcony has got to be even better than drinking on a porch. So much light! My plants would be so happy! So I’ve had this entirely achievable dream for several years now, and I apparently don’t want it enough to move out of my house.


But! I can combine that dream with another odd notion that I’ve had for a while, which is that I think I would like living in the upstairs apartment across from my still-imaginary husband. Some people react very strongly to that, say that of course I’ll want to share a house with him and have the same bedroom and when I get there the idea of living in adjacent apartments will be ridiculous. OK. That’s entirely likely. But from the outside, I kinda like the idea. First, I’d get to live upstairs in a north-facing fourplex with a balcony. And second, maybe it would be nice to have entirely different spaces. Maybe he doesn’t want to live in a brightly colored forest with no air conditioning. Maybe I don’t want to live in some boy-gadget haven with a TV. Maybe we’re old enough to like private time and independent spaces and sharing those spaces as well. Of course we can compromise, but maybe we would like adjacent apartments better than those trade-offs. I know that doesn’t work with kids. I know that it isn’t what a lot of couples want. I know that I can’t predict what I’ll want. But some part of me likes the idea, maybe as something to return to after the kids leave home.










*I will also add that I think that the twelfth picture is fucking UNJUSTIFIABLE, and my doubts about the editorial choices at Magnum are only increasing, especially their choices of images of women and girls. Their famous women/women athletes series were bullshit. Their mother/child series had some very lovely and touching shots. But I can’t see how that sexualized picture got into a series on children at play when there must be thousands of other pictures of children playing (in Asia, perhaps?) that could have offered additional insight into what children do during summer break. I think someone should be fired demoted to coffee bitch over that picture. Slate, why’d you host that crap?