I found myself recalling that feeling of walking short-legged along the suburban sidewalk, hopping over the cracks so as not to break my mommy’s back, this past week when I wandered from the downtown hubbub into my neighborhood — not suburban, exactly, but old-fashioned, with its yards and alleys and single-family houses. Not for the first time I cursed the easy technology that makes it so easy to break down the old boundaries between work and home, the laptops and Wi-Fi and Zoom rooms that have brought work home to our tables and kitchen counters, and that have conversely brought home to work in the form of texts and too-easy-to-access social media updates. Before I left Chicago for good I worked for a while in the city and commuted back to the suburbs in the late afternoon, or sometimes much later in the evening if I was going out with friends. Each time I did so I felt I was replicating my family history in a small way, for like so many upwardly mobile white people in the ‘50s my grandparents moved out of the city and into the suburbs even as the expressway I drove on was being built. My uncle, an electrical engineer, helped plan the highway lighting that enabled those nighttime commutes.

Source: Daily Sun September 07, 2021 17:15 UTC