I'm what's known as a city kid. I'm not an expat by country or nation, but by metropolis: a New Yorker living in Melbourne, not an American living in Australia. Hey, I like visiting the countryside, but I could only ever live in a big city. That's just who I am. I really don't think I could ever live anywhere with fewer than a million people, and even that would be on the sleepy side for my taste. I've lived in a few cities by now — for those of you keeping score, I've spent the past five years moving between four cities on three continents.
A lot of people tell me they wish I could travel as much as I do, and yet I haven't been traveling — I've been moving. They're not the same at all. When you travel, you define things by how different they are from your home; you seek out the exotic. When you move, you have to remake your home in an entirely new place, so you find yourself looking for all the ways that things are the same. So when I look back on the four cities I've lived in since 2000 — New York, Chicago, Prague and Melbourne — what strikes me is not how different they are, but how similar.
In New York and Prague, I lived right in the middle of things, on city streets, in apartments in multi-story buildings, often with shops right on the ground floor. I had no car (except as occasionally borrowed from my father or a friend), and had to go everywhere on public transport, which was only a couple of blocks away. To go shopping, I walked to the supermarket with a wire cart and pushed the groceries home in it. I did the laundry in the coin-operated washers and dryers in the basement of the building. My garbage went into the bins in the building, and a superintendent put them out for collection, whenever that was.
In Chicago (previously) and Melbourne (currently), though, I live in a neighbourhood a bit further out on the fringes, with the entire floor of a small building, or in the case of Melbourne, my own terrace house. In both places, I've had a backyard, and private outdoor areas to sit, and places to grow plants — I even started my first herb garden here. I have a car, with either my own spot or plenty of room out front. I take public transport to school, but end up using the car at night or for longer distances, and I drive to the supermarket and bring the groceries home in the trunk. I have my own washing machine, and I hang my clothes out to dry on a line out back. I collect my own garbage, put it in the bin, and wheel it to the curb every Monday night.
That's right, I hang my wash up on a line and put the garbage out myself. I even clipped some fresh thyme for dinner last night. Compared with how I was raised, sometimes I feel like I'm practically a farmer. But while my suburban (well, "inner suburban") lives have definitely been more comfortable in many ways compared to my urban ones, they haven't been as exciting. I have a nicer, bigger place here than in Prague or New York, but I'm also further away from the exciting neighbourhoods, and I end up spending a lot more time holed up at home.
It's a common convention that living in the city is a more immature phase that people go through before wising up and moving out to the suburbs, that whole "settling down and mellowing out" thing. As a city kid who loved living in Manhattan, I always hated that idea, that a life lived in the city could only be an attenuated one, something to be borne only until you got married and could finally move out to Long Island or Westchester. And yet part of me also feels torn at the idea of giving up my 2BR house for US$750 a month to go back to NYC and pay twice that for a 300 sq. ft. studio shoe box. I like having warmer, California-like weather where I can wear flip-flops more than half the year, and yet I miss cuddling up to my steam-heat radiator and watching a huge blizzard drape the city streets in a foot of soft snow. I miss the electric lifestyle of a huge metropolis, having all the shops, bars and restaurants I could want within walking distance of my front door, being able to get any kind of food delivered in 25 minutes, hopping on and off the subway to get me downtown in ten minutes or less; and yet I also like hearing birds sing in the trees outside my window everyday, and eating lunch out back on a sunny afternoon, and being able to look up and see stars at night as I cross the railroad tracks on my walk back from the tram.
The famous "sunscreen speech" advised us — I'm paraphrasing — to live in the big, cold city but leave before it made us too hard, and then live out in more spacious, warmer climes but leave before it made us too soft.
So what's the next option? I have to wonder where I can go that's not too hard and not too soft — but "just right" — outside of a fairy tale.