snoburbia, the blog

where the wild things aren’t

•••

In snoburbia, just try to get your child a play-date in July or August. Go ahead, just try.

The children are gone.

That’s because, if your child is not on vacation, he is required to be at sport, music or equestrian camp. Home is simply not an option. If your child is at home, you are a bad parent, or, worse yet, you are not interesting.

•••

leaving snoburbia: a summer photo essay

 
•••

have a nice vacation, ma'am

•••

From Washingtonian magazine:

If you are away on vacation, Chevy Chase Village officers will pick up your mail and hold it all at headquarters, free of charge. And they will check your vacant house once per shift, if you ask them.

Awww. Isn’t that so quaint?

(And just think, all that largesse is paid for by a few speed cameras on busy Connecticut Avenue by Silver Spring and Rockville drivers trying to get home.)

•••

land of the free and the snobbish

•••

Darn! As it turns out, democracy makes us snobby. At least it does according to Joseph Epstein’s 2002 book, Snobbery: The American Version (from a Slate book review):

Snobbery feeds on social uncertainty, and in a rigidly organized society with clear and mostly hereditary class distinctions, no one could hope for upward mobility or fear the loss of status failure.

From a New York Times review of the same book:

But no place, he insists, proved a more ideal incubator of snobbery than the United States. Living in a country with few built-in class distinctions, Americans turned to snobbery as compensation, a means of clarifying what the Constitution failed to: just who was better than whom. (Alexis de Toqueville, who saw this phenomenon up close, wrote that “democratic institutions most successfully develop sentiments of envy in the human heart.”)

•••

busch gardens, not six flags

•••

If you are a parent in snoburban Virginia or Maryland, and if your children beg you to go to one of those crass theme parks, and you give in, the kids must go to Busch Gardens, Kings Dominion or Hershey Park three hours away; certainly not Six Flags, in our backyard.

•••

lions and tigers and bikes, oh my

 

•••

In overclass snoburbia, danger lurks everywhere.

If my 13-year-old rides a bike without wearing a helmet, she will surely die. If a tender soul at our swimming pool gets hit with a basketball, henceforth all basketballs shall be banned from the pool. You may have a pool noodle in the pool – for 45 minutes, once a summer – on Raft Night only. Noodles = danger!

If one child falls from the jungle gym at school, from now on there will be no climbing at recess. For a few years, our elementary school even banned tag – because someone might get hurt.

•••

d.c. sweeps up

If you drive into our nation’s capitol, bring your wallet.

Washington, D.C. is infamous for its aggressive parking ticket system (more here, here and here.) Other municipalities send representatives to D.C. to learn about it. And now the city has added cameras to its street sweepers to rake in even more revenue.

Residents are irate. D.C. drivers constantly shuffle their cars around to avoid getting street-sweeping tickets. Oftentimes, on sweep day, tow trucks move cars and don’t tell their owners where.

It’s a city-wide problem. Oh, except in swanky Georgetown and overclass snoburb Ward 3, which includes Chevy Chase, Foxhall and Cleveland Park, where they don’t sweep at all. (Georgetown is “hand-swept.”)

•••

the listserv follies

•••

For local entertainment, I look no further than my snoburb’s local listserv. It never fails to entertain. Drama. Comedy. Posturing. Recriminations. It’s all there.

The latest brouhaha is over an apparent crime committed in broad daylight: A seller of “polypropylene rugs” set up shop on a vacant lot in our town’s gentrifying business district. What’s worse is that he sits on an old sofa.

•••

yes, ma'am

 

•••

I just returned from visiting a foreign country –  the American South. My hosts were gracious, generous and fun. The food there was delicious, and the conversation full of laughter and sparkle.

But it’s just different there. The men and boys hunt and fish. The children are unerringly polite, saying, “yes, ma’am” to my queries. They referred to me as a Northerner (do we in the North refer to ourselves as anything?) Religion is front and center. They seemed surprised (dismayed?) that I am friends with openly gay parents – and that my town has a gay mayor.

They are all wonderful, lovely people, and being with them was a blast. But because they are just not as comfortable with the wider range of beliefs we have in big city snoburbia, I often had to bite my tongue. And sometimes I felt like an oaf among the graceful ladies. I love it there, but I have to say I breathed a sigh of relief upon touching down on the familiar East Coast and returning to my home in the snoburbs.

Now, if only I could get my children to say, “yes, ma’am”…

•••