Sub-urbs

Ours was not a through street
local traffic mostly
and even that wasn’t a lot
less than half the families owned cars.
So around mid-afternoon when school got out
an impromptu soccer game would start,
the black tar strips that separated the concrete sections of the road
would serve as goal lines
the pitch could be expanded as needed,
learning how to use the curb was key.
In summer the Spanish students would arrive
to learn to speak English with a Dublin accent,
they were a lot better than us
they spoke soccer fluently.
Occasionally our neighbor, who was proud of her roses
and didn’t like us trampling around to retrieve the ball,
would call the police and we’d all scatter
and re-group as soon as they were gone.
Then just around 6 pm,
doors would open all along the streets
and aproned moms would call their kids
in for tea, sausages, and baked beans on toast
and slowly the game would evaporate
leaving the street empty and my neighbor’s roses
safe for the moment.

Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan asks us to write of:

Suburban Desperation: About the American Dream (any consumer or capitalist fantasy will do), about the vast necropolis of suburbia and the things its revenants still carry out with deadly, ghostly, embalmed precision.

Obviously I haven’t done that. In Ireland there was too much history and ironic distance to talk about the American Dream. The American Dream was a construct that came to us through I Love Lucy. The suburbs I lived in spread south from Dublin and west into the Dublin hills, row upon row of semi-detached houses and yes they were all made out of ticky tacky and all looked just the same. At the center of these communities were cavernous churches to house the faithful on Sundays. But I can’t really impose, in retrospect, a negative narrative on this. When you’re a kid, it’s just the place you live, it’s what you know, it’s the place you get to be a kid in.