SUBURBAN DRIVER

Seven-thirty in the morning. The sun has not yet risen above the roof lines of the houses on the street. Getting into the car you juggle the shoulder bag containing a laptop and the work you brought home last night but never got around to because there was a home renovation special on television. You almost drop your purse and lunch bag as you manoeuvre the door open, and stow everything in the back seat. Wow, it’s a mess, you should really try to make time to clean out the whole car this weekend. Starting the engine, you wave to Dave down the street as he comes out of his house. He smiles back – his hands are full – as you back out of your driveway.

There are not many cars on the road yet, you only pass four before you turn onto the main road. Two lights before the 401 interchange, cars start to back up in the right lane. You want to switch to the left and go faster, but that would mean cutting back in before the last stoplight, and you really hate it when others cut in front of you, so you follow along slowly in the line, until finally it’s your turn to cross the intersection. A car stopped at the red light decides there is enough room between you and the car ahead of you for him to turn right in front of you, forcing you to break as you’re signalling to get on the westbound ramp. This causes a truck two cars behind you to honk his horn, as the light has changed and he didn’t have enough time to get across.

Seven forty-six am. You’ve made it onto the ramp, and you’re accelerating up to speed, but are required to slow down again as you try to merge into traffic that is suddenly backed up. Pulling in front of an SUV, you wave a thank-you, and promptly get cut off by a Mercedes who has sped to the end of the merge lane and must get out of it before it ends. You hit the brakes and curse at stupid drivers who make the commute more stressful for everyone. Traffic flows steadily for awhile and you turn on the radio for the ten-minute update. There is a truck blocking one lane in the express, two exits ahead. You see three cars simultaneously signal to get out of the lane heading into the express lanes. Guess they heard the same update.

Seven fifty-eight am. You pass the truck, who has broken down, at a slightly faster pace than those being forced around by the flashing lights of a tow truck and police car. Why must everyone slow down to take a look at another’s misfortune?

Eight oh six am. You’ve finally reached your exit and you steer into the right turn lane, only to notice that there is a road works truck blocking the lane you want to turn into. Slowly, along with all the other drivers who didn’t look far enough ahead, you must merge back into the centre lane. Except that no one wants to let you. By inching forward and to the side, you manage to squeeze in front of a Prius who honks at you and throws up his arms.

Eight twelve am. You’re at the last stop light before your office. There’s a Tim Horton’s with a drive-thru on the other side. You see a poster advertising the new breakfast sandwich and your stomach rumbles. The light turns green and half-way across you decide, what the heck, I’ve got time, and turn into the driveway. Coming around the side of the building, you reach the drive-thru line with two cars behind you. The line is longer than you expected but you can’t get out now. Curbs are blocking you on both sides, and there are now three cars in line behind you.

Eight twenty-one am. You pull out of the Tim’s parking lot with your breakfast sandwich, coffee and a donut – the extra wait made you just annoyed enough not to care about the extra calories – and drive the last three hundred yards to your office.

Eight twenty-seven am. You sit down at your desk, turn on your computer and sip your coffee. Your forty minute drive took almost an hour this morning and you’re feeling stressed and on edge before you’ve even opened your email. Maybe it’s time to move closer to the city.

Different point of view

I'm not sure if this is a story or not, it's written from a different perspective and not so much telling what happened as what could happen. Does it work? I'm not sure.


VEHICLE DEPENDANCE

What distance is considered reasonable to drive instead of walk? It all depends on where you are. In a large metropolitan city, a few blocks, or half an hour might be a completely reasonable walking distance. In the suburbs that distance shrinks considerably, until you have to ask, where would I walk to?

Take Pickering as an example. Would it be reasonable to walk to the mall if you lived in the Amberlea neighbourhoods? Probably not. It’s possible. You could do it in about an hour, but the majority of that time would be spent walking along the side of a highway. Two lanes in each direction, a seventy kilometre per hour speed limit and no sidewalks. Most people drive to the mall.

What about the coffee shop? Tim Horton’s or Second Cup. It would take around half an hour to walk to either of these, something a city dweller would think nothing of. But what if it rains, or you’re in a hurry, you don’t have half an hour to spend walking there and another half hour walking back. It’s better to drive to the coffee shop, got through the drive-thru lane, and continue on your way.

The grocery store. Most people, even in the suburbs, live within a fifteen minute walk of a grocery store. But by going to the grocery store, one expects to pick up groceries, and with our busy lives we usually need to get enough at one time to last at least a week, making the bags many and quite heavy, especially if you happen to purchase a case of pop or cat litter. It’s just easier to take the car.

How about Church. Whether or not you attend regularly, it’s right there, across the street from the grocery store, you pass it every time you got to work, the mall or the coffee shop. If you were going to church, would you walk? It would only take ten minutes, or less, you could use the time to contemplate your faith, or lack thereof. But very few people walk to church, even when the weather is fine. It could be because church usually involves dressing up, and fancy shoes are not comfortable to walk in. Or it could be embarrassment, to be seen walking through the neighbourhood wearing your Sunday best, people would know that you were going to church.

Your friend’s house. They live just down the street and around the corner, or through the pathway and on the other side of the court. But you’re going to watch movies and hang out with some people that you haven’t seen in a long time, the evening might end really late and you don’t want to walk home alone in the dark, even if it would only take five minutes. So you drive.

The mailbox. Most subdivisions in Pickering, built after 1990 don’t have door to door mail delivery, but a box, that is located central to a couple of streets, where everyone’s mail is delivered into cubby lockers, like in an apartment building. It’s very convenient, just at the end of the street. It would take less than five minutes to walk there and back. The reason you don’t walk to the mailbox is simple. You pick up your mail on your way home or on your way out in the car. If there was one time when it was raining, and you had a cold already, so you stayed home from work, but really needed to check if your insurance cheque had come in the mail so you drove the eighty-five meters to the mailbox and back, no one needs to know about that. It was a onetime thing. Under normal circumstances, of course you would have walked.

Sample Pages

Christmas Lights

It starts after Halloween. There’s no specific when it happens, it’s a gradual building throughout the month of November, and then Wham! its full-blown presence hits on December first. Christmas lights on houses, around windows, wrapping around trees and lining driveways. Blow-up Santas and snowmen frolic on front lawns and atop roofs. Rudolph leads the other eight reindeer across neighbourhoods, and candy canes and cedar wreaths adorn doors and windows.

On some streets it’s a matter of pride that every house puts up lights so that the entire row of houses gleam in the darkness like a runway leading everyone home. But most streets have a few dark houses, either because the occupants don’t celebrate Christmas, they go away for the holiday or they simply can’t be bothered to participate in the tradition.

The most common form of decoration is lights lining the eave of the roof. They run across garages and up peaks and around dormers. Others surround doorways and windows, enhancing the geometry of house and making it shine. Some houses use a chain of lights that hang down in vertical strings from the roof line, like icicles.

When the new LED lights were introduced, it was easy to tell which houses had embraced the new technology. The colours were more subdued than the traditional incandescent bulbs, darker and just a little cold. The biggest difference was with the white lights. Incandescent lights shone a clear warm glow, while the LEDs looked more like an icy blue. In the last couple of years the manufacturers of LED Christmas lights have managed to adjust the colour so that it is closer to the cosy, more inviting incandescent white. As a result, along with their energy savings have made them much more popular.

In every neighbourhood, just like there are dark houses, there are always a few homes that take decorating with lights to the extreme. These houses don’t just put lights on the eave of the roof or on a couple of trees. In some cases every corner and edge of a house will be outlined in lights, showcasing the elevation lines at night. The roof ridge can be an anchor for cords of lights to run down to the rain gutter, and chimneys can be wrapped in red and white strings to resemble a peppermint stick.

There is one house in a subdivision just north of the 401 highway that puts on a spectacular light display every Christmas. The owners have covered every edge and opening with strings of lights in different colours. Not multi-coloured strings, but different colours for each area. The eaves are lined in green, the corners in red and the windows in white. The three trees are covered in blue, purple and yellow lights respectively. The tree nearest to the street is the one planted by the city. It’s a Norway Maple and bare of leaves for the winter. The yellow lights wrap around the trunk, starting just below the pile of snow on the curb and extending to all of the branches capable of holding them. It is a glowing column, with arms reaching toward the sky.

The driveway is lined on both sides with LED-lit, plastic candy canes and stars shine from the centre of each street-facing window. The roof is occupied by a Santa figure – lit up from inside – along with his sleigh and nine reindeer. Rudolph stands right at the edge of the roof, red nose gleaming, ready to take flight. On the lawn below, illuminated elves are scattered about with glowing boxes topped with brightly lit up ribbons. Some seem to be placing them under trees, while others are creating an elf-ladder up to the roof, stretching to return a package to Santa’s sleigh. If that was not enough, there was one more lawn ornament. The six-foot tall illuminated snowman, wearing a black top hat and holding a broom; he appeared in mid-November and will stay in residence until the first spring thaw.

There is a television show on in December called Invasion of the Christmas Lights. It showcases homeowners who go to extreme lengths decorating their houses for Christmas. Some of them incorporate moving characters, flashing lights, and music, and most end up with hydro bills in the tens of thousands of dollars for the month of December.

Working Abstract

I've pieced together bits of different abstracts and come up with this, it's kind of disjointed, but I think it gets across what I'm trying to do; at least better than previous attempts. Comments?

27 STORIES – ABSTRACT

The suburbs are a man-made creation. Places that are unique in their homogeneity, and lack of reference to existing conditions. Created to be the American Dream, they were seen as the perfect blend of city and country that was accessible to all. The suburbs of North America have become a highly disputed area of design and planning. There are many voices criticizing the buildings and image of suburbia, and very few that are willing to stand up for it. Not everything about these semi-urban living areas is wonderful, but it is not all tract housing and miles of asphalt going nowhere.
The suburbs are a place that millions of people call home, but that no one really sees as a singular specific place. They are just one of many, a series of copies that extend without limits. The suburbs are places just like any other. They have landmarks and events, buildings where people gather and areas of conflict.
The inspiration for this thesis came from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. A series of fifty-five stories describing the travels of Marco Polo. Individually, each city is fictitious, but together they make up Marco Polo’s Venice.
By writing these stories, I have attempted to show you the suburbs as a place. To make them visible, so that the next time you think of suburbia, it is not just tract housing and strip malls that immediately come to mind.

Kevin

Kevin lived in a typical two storey, five bedroom house with his mother, father, older sister and dog. If you looked closely, the house was not exactly the same as the others on the street, though the only difference between it and the one on the corner was the colour Kevin’s parents chose to paint the garage door. That and the big maple tree the people on the corner planted when they moved in fourteen years ago. Kevin’s family moved into their house when he was seven, and his sister was eight. They both attended the public elementary school that could be seen from the end of the street, two blocks away.

From the time the moving truck pulled away from the newly inhabited grey brick house, everyone on the street within earshot knew Kevin’s name. It wasn’t that he was a social or friendly child who couldn’t resist talking to everyone and anyone he saw; it was the fact that no matter what he was doing he couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. Every time one of his parents came out of the house after they had carried in a box or a piece of furniture, they would shout Kevin’s name. Telling him to stop doing something, to help his sister or to stay out of the way.

My first encounter with Kevin was the year I got my driver’s licence and was finally allowed to drive my mother’s car. I had opened the garage door, then gone back into the house to get my purse. While inside the house, I decided to change my shirt, which I had just noticed had a stain on the sleeve. After changing my top, I then needed to change my shorts, and it was twenty minutes before I went back into the garage. The driver’s side door and the passenger door behind it were standing open. The box of Kleenex in the backseat was empty, tissues scattered on the cushion and the garage floor. The CDs that we kept stored in the armrest between the driver and passenger seats were on the seat and dash, opened but not taken out of the plastic. I panicked, thinking someone had stolen something or was still lurking in the garage behind one of the cars. I went back in the house to get my father, and I heard Kevin’s mother shout his name.

Over the course of that summer I found golf balls on the lawn when I cut the grass, Nerf balls in the garden and a baseball in the backyard. That last one worried me. Our neighbours behind and to either side, do not have children. Rarely is there anyone in their backyards at all. And given the ball’s location at the side of the yard, almost between the houses, I had to conclude that the ball had come from the direction of the front yard and the street. There is not a lot of space between our house and the one next to it. Probably only the minimum required setback distance of three feet between the house and the fence. In order for that baseball to have landed where it did; it missed the bay window in our living room by less than two feet.

New Story

MEET ME AT TIM’S

There is no corner coffee shop, or mom and pop cafe in the town I grew up in. I don’t know if there ever was. But there has always been a Tim Horton’s. The small store on the north-west corner of Whites and Kingston Road was apparently one of the oldest in Ontario. That is, until it was torn down and a drive-thru was put in its place. Around the same time, on the north-east corner, a plaza was built with a large Tim Horton’s and Wendy’s combination restaurant and drive-thru. You might think that two of the same fast food chain at one intersection would be excessive but not if the store is a Tim Horton’s. Both locations do a booming business. Every morning there is a line at both drive-thrus, and there are always people sitting with friends or alone with the paper at the tables of the larger store.

The Tim Horton’s/Wendy’s restaurant is only a short walk from my former high school. However, it was built after I graduated and left for university, so I never had the option of going there for lunch. Despite this, somehow it became the meeting place to catch up and hang out when my friends and I were home from our respective colleges for the weekend. We would call around on Saturday afternoon or shout across the table/bar/dance floor on Saturday night: “coffee at Tim’s tomorrow?” And we would all meet up around eleven on Sunday mornings, grab our double-doubles and timbits before sitting at a table, sometimes for hours, catching up on local gossip and telling stories of our exploits at school. There was a sign, posted on every column in the store that read: ‘ENJOY YOUR STAY WITH US BUT NO LOITERING PLEASE 20 MINUTE TIME LIMIT THANK YOU.’ The rule was never enforced unless patrons were disruptive or hadn’t made a purchase. Sometimes we would stay long enough that a late lunch from Wendy’s would be in order.

I would always try to sit facing the rest of the room so that I could watch the people who came in. There were always several different types that were clearly recognizable. The after-church crowd. They were usually dressed very nicely, sometimes with children, typically in groups of three or four. There were the singles, doing the hangover coffee run, who had either walked over, or decided the drive-thru line up was too long. And there were the people who would come in for a visiting box. A box of cookies, muffins or donuts to take with them to a friend or relative’s house, in order to avoid showing up empty handed.

When I was younger, and Sunday was considered a family day, we would sometimes stop at Tim Horton’s or Coffee Time after church on our way to visit my grandparents. On these occasions we would pick up a box of donuts to be shared with whoever else was visiting that day. My grandparents lived north of us, just outside of Port Perry. There used to be a Coffee Time donut shop along the 7/12 highway at the turn off to go into town. (Town being Port Perry, also known as Port). I used to love stopping there, and choosing which donuts went into the box. The Coffee Time closed down before I started high school and a burger diner opened up. It lasted just over a year before going out of business. The building was empty for awhile before a cafe and deli opened up. It lasted eight months.

We don’t drive up there very often anymore, but the last time I did, the building had been bulldozed and the empty lot had a for sale sign on the corner. I wonder sometimes if a Tim Horton’s with a drive-thru would have been able to survive there. The highway is a well-travelled route, especially in the summertime with people from the cities heading north to their cottages.