When I was a kid living in the Chicago suburbs, the city changed my area code from 708 to 630 due to the flux of people moving out into the suburbs. Now, 708, that made sense to me. I wasn't living in the city proper, so I wasn't expecting 312, but I had, for a time, a nice, docile suburban area code. I wrote out my new phone number and remember it looked wrong with the zero hanging off the end, like a gaping mouth with food falling out of it. Conversely, if I ever saw a 312 or a 773 area code, I assumed it belonged to some older girl with a haircut like Patti Smith and a penchant for knives. Or maybe it belonged to a bar, full of drug addicts and no bathroom. The numbers of the city area codes looked experienced and mean, and I wouldn't pick up the phone and dial one if it was the last number left in the world. Who knew who would pick up?

Maybe I was a little neurotic , but I wasn't far off from what all the soccer moms around me were thinking. Everyone in my neighborhood knew that the city was a death trap, only good for museums and field trips, or maybe a play, but it was to be dealt with in small doses and in big groups, with chaperones. All our grandparents had lived in Chicago. They settled into the neighborhoods that spoke their language and worked in factories or stockyards or bars to pay rent, and on the weekends they went swing dancing at the Aragon Ballroom . Our parents had worked hard to get the hell out. They saw how our grandparents lived, kids half-stuffed in a single flat of a house, with suspicious quarter-inch holes in the windows and no yard to speak of. They wanted their kids to have more than just a yard; they wanted their kids to have neighborhood swimming pools. Eventually they bribed the grandparents to follow them out of the old Chicago neighborhood too, so that us kids wouldn't have to dodge bullets when coming to visit. Now all us kids, the product of the suburbs, are moving back to the city, working at an office in the Loop or in a neighborhood bar, going to see bands play on the weekends at the Aragon Ballroom.

America is a country of immigrants . It's in our collective blood to keep shifting our homes – and so then, our identities – every now and then. Happiness becomes a matter of being at the right place at the right time, and this migratory trend shifts with each generation. When the first generation of immigrants came to the industrial America of the new twentieth century, the West had long since been won, there were no new territories to map, no wilderness to be conquered. The American city, with all of its dangers, risks and potential rewards, had replaced the wilderness of earlier generations. The city had become the place to stake a claim, to seek social acceptance and economic freedom.

Their children found new ways to civilize un-staked claims on the cities' periphery: the suburbs. With suburbia, manifest destiny found its perfection, in that even nature could be controlled and managed in the form of identically plotted green lawns. This generation bargained with the city and took what it could, then escaped with the goods to the suburbs to live divorced from the congestion and danger of the city. Urban landscapes became synonymous with decay, and the move out of the decay marked a fresh start.

This idea of a fresh start infiltrates national consciousness. In his book “Restless Nation: Starting Over in America,” James Jasper notes the American obsession with the move doesn't always necessitate a physical relocation as much as it concerns itself with the idea of movement. The West still looms before us as a fantasy of open road and unincorporated land, and though the land has already been tamed and the freeways have already served as a stage for millions of soul searches and road novels, the American West is upheld as a bastion of self-realization and fulfillment of every escapist fantasy imaginable. According to Jasper, “America was a symbol in world culture long before it was a destination, and its image as the land of liberty was first crafted elsewhere, out of the psychological needs of foreigners.” We graft attributes upon a location, a location where the attributes will aid in the excavation of our “ideal” selves. We correlate that locale with attaining happiness.

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