Growing Up in Urban America

One of the things I like about Jonathan Kellerman’s novels is that inevitably they get me thinking. For example, the following is excerpted from his 2006 novel, Gone. The narrator is the central character, psychologist Alex Delaware.

Back when I treated children, I routinely took histories from parents and learned what family life could be like in L.A. People packing up and moving every year or two, the surrender to impulse, the death of domestic ritual.

Many of the parents I saw lived in sun-baked tracts with no other kids nearby and spent hours each day being bused to and from beige corrals that claimed to be schools. Long electronic nights were bleached by cathode and dump-thumped by the current angry music. Bedroom windows looked out to hazy miles of neighborhoods that couldn’t really be called that.

Lots of imaginary friends in L.A. That, I supposed, was inevitable. It’s a company town and the product is fantasy.

The city kills grass with red carpets, worships fame for its own sake, demolishes landmarks with glee because the high-stakes game is reinvention. Show up at your favorite restaurant and you’re likely to find a sign trumpeting failure and the windows covered with brown paper. Phone a friend and get a disconnected number.

No Forwarding. It could be the municipal motto.

You can be gone in L.A. for a long time before anyone considers it a problem.

~Jonathan Kellerman, Gone, 2006 pp. 5-6.

After I read those lines, I reread them. Then I started thinking.

Even though Kellerman’s protagonist, Alex Delaware, is focusing on life in Los Angeles, the situation isn’t much different in other U.S. cities. Lots of children live in neighborhoods where there are no other kids nearby. My street is one of those. Other than a couple of us old foggies, most of the residents here are relatively young and, if they have children, the children are also very young. That means that in the neighborhood there are perhaps a half-dozen kids who are school age—and that includes kindergarten. When school is not in session, I have no idea where these children go to find other kids.

Of course, maybe the kids don’t seek other kids. Perhaps they spend the days and nights watching TV or playing video games or surfing the net. Perhaps their friends are all somewhere in cyberspace, which is a down-side to our Internet technology for both children and many adults.

Go to favorite restaurant and find a sign trumpeting failure—or, as I did, just am empty lot? It happens all the time, even in mid-sized cities such as Louisville. But I have already written about that, at least about the disappearing fast food joints.

When Alex Delaware reflects that L.A. is a “company town,” I must admit that I never thought about that. Lots of cities are “company towns.” Sometimes the power is shared between two or more companies, but often the nature of the city and its residents is set by the largest employer in town.

And what about calling a friend and finding that they no longer exist? I have done that more than once and in more than one city. I’ll admit that moving around a lot has added to that losing contact with friends. But, then, our increasing mobility is one of our society’s strongpoints, too. Right?

Back to kids growing up in urban American society. I am most happy my sons are grown. I am less happy that my grandchildren are experiencing life in this rat-race of a society. I am most concerned about future generations as we seem to become less and less stable and more and more strangers to each other.