280. Ghetto

I don't mean ghetto like how rappers mean ghetto. I mean more like how ghetto used to mean a somewhat sealed off portion of a city filled, in European cities, with Jews, and then later in America, with Italians or other immigrant groups.

I drove down McKnight Road today and thought about the kid I used to pick up, for $40 a week, and take to the summer camp where I worked, which wasn't a summer camp as much as a glorified babysitting job in the air conditioned school where I'd worked the year before. I remember how Anthony was so shocked I lived in the CITY, in the GHETTO. He meant it like the rappers do. Crime everywhere, drug dealers and pimps on every corner, shoot outs between cops and gang members.

Omigosh it's such a terrible place. Anthony hated living so close to the ghetto, out there just west of 170, and was happy that the lawsuit his mother had pursued when the teacher at his county school did something unspeakable to him (!!! That's how it was said to me when I asked him what he meant by "settlement") had paid off and they were moving out to the far reaches of West County. Where he wouldn't wind up, you know, caught in the crossfire.

Now, his obvious personal problems aside, it wasn't the first or the last time I'd heard the sentiment.

I don't live in the ghetto. I live on a tree-lined street a half block from a Victorian walking park. I know all my neighbors and not a single one of them sells drugs. Not a one. A few of them own guns, but they shoot deer with them. People hold down jobs that do not involve pimps. Really.

I know it hasn't always been this way--I know because I've been there, called the police about that. And I know that I do live closer to the scene of crime than the boy I drove to camp that summer (although I will point out that some crimes happen anywhere).

But in some ways, I wonder about the ghetto-ization of my children. They are city kids who do city things. They attend a charter school and go to a city parish. Yeah, I take them out to the country and they know an oak from a maple from a catalpa tree, but I wonder about the area of the world I skip over on my way to the trees and bugs and pit toilets. The suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs, the same suburb all over the country. It is the same wherever you go. Yeah, it was New York Ave and South 1st Street and Orangewood Trail and Fairwick Drive and Sonora Place and Pruitt Street and North Beechwood and Spring Meadow but it was all the same dang place. By the end of it I was more than happy to shed it. The longer I live in the city the less it looks like an option. Even my parents live in the city now.

But will my kids? Or will they shun the ghetto and the 'old ways' of their parents and move out to some tacky exurb? Will they feel they were kept from something because I raised them in the city instead of the two-car-garage no sidewalk lifestyle of my own childhood?

There must be a reason beyond ignorance and fear to want to raise your child out there in the suburbs. Maybe it's yards or driveways. I don't know. I just know that as a child, I would have been shocked by the way my kids are being raised. If I knew them as peers I would be intrigued and probably a bit jealous of what they had that I didn't have. Fiona and Daisy haven't expressed similar ideas yet about friends out in the suburbs. I don't think they see the difference so strikingly yet. People live in different places. Simple as that. I don't know why county kids don't see it the same way. Maybe it's an inside-looking-out vs an outside-looking-in mentality.

Anthony would be, let me count, 27 years old now. Old enough to have a family of his own. I wonder where he lives.