Movin' On Out

The time has finally come. Six months, nineteen days and fourteen hours after I gave birth to my first child, Meyer, I am perusing home listings on that great repository of all things for sale or rent: Craig’s List. I am not looking for the to-die-for two bed condo in a high rise overlooking City Park or the charming apartment with the claw foot tub that is a five minute walk from downtown. No, I am not looking for anything within the special circle of hell that the inner city of Denver has come to represent for me and my fledging family. The time has come – I’m searching for a nice, sensible home in the suburbs.

This is not the first time that I have contemplated a move with Meyer. Shortly after he was born our fabulous loft in the up-and-coming Baker neighborhood that we had lived in for over a year began to show its limitations in the spatial department and so we began our search. We desperately wanted to move back to the neighborhood known as Capitol Hill. With its trendy shops, ubiquitous but independent coffee houses, parks, fun restaurants and walking distances to downtown we felt that it would be a great place to jump on board the new family train. We had both lived in Capitol Hill before and had treasured the experience. Sure! There is crime. Sure! There are drug deals. Sure! There are a lot of homeless wandering the streets and helping themselves to the contents of every dumpster they happen across. But it’s charming… right?

We are young, we fancy ourselves hip, we enjoyed Cap Hill as single party people. The suburbs were for our Moms and Dads. The suburbs were where we grew up, where we lazed about in a white-bread stupor that hampered our ability to be cool and enjoy things like diversity and culture and good coffee (being that we spent almost every weekend night of our bland youth gulping down Village Inn coffee without any qualms about its wretched coffeesque taste whatsoever). The suburbs were for quitters, for people who didn’t ‘get it’ and, most importantly, for young Moms with an eye on becoming soccer Mom of the year and Dads who wore a suit every day and did stuff with numbers for a career. In other words, the suburbs were not us and we took a certain amount of pride in the slightly harsher but more rewarding lifestyle we had decided to embark upon.

When we found it, the apartment that would make our Cap Hill dreams come true, we were delighted. We signed our lease and took the keys with glee in our hearts and visions of our new, cool, urban life. Yeah it was small, but it had two bedrooms (something we had decided we needed so we could have a nursery). No, it didn’t have a dishwasher but it looked out on a courtyard (I had forgotten how almost every apartment in Capitol Hill faces a busy street with traffic noise. We would still have to do laundry in the communal germ pool known as the laundry room at $1.25 a wash and $1.00 a dry but it was ideally located, nicely appointed and had a parking space (heaven in the neighborhood).

We moved in, painted some and settled into our new life. But then, we started having trash problems. Well, we didn’t start having trash problems, but someone obviously did because the dumpster which sat twenty feet from our balcony was often overflowing with all manner of household effluvia and began to stink. Not good. Then there was the day that we had to move a large couch out of the way because someone had thoughtfully dropped it right behind our parked car. Oh well…life in Cap Hill…right? Instead of dwelling on the trash problem we threw a big housewarming party and invited all of our friends to come see our fun new digs.

But then there was the day that we came out of the back door of the building and witnessed a man and woman relaxing while sharing a crack pipe in the alley. That’s right, I said CRACK PIPE. I was overcome with guilt and thoughts about what I was doing to my baby. How could any place be so cool enough to overcome the presence of people smoking crack? Especially if we are trying to do the best job possible of raising our son in a healthy, happy environment. Something didn’t sit well.

Then came the fire. In the dumpster that sits just behind our parking space and maybe forty feet from our unit an entire household of goods that had been deposited there went up in flames. I came home to three fire trucks, a lot of smoke and video my husband had taken of tall flames licking ominously close to our home. While I tried to forget the incident by downing gourmet roasted coffee at the coffee house down the block, I was still bothered.

Once the cold weather hit and the radiators came on the mice came out – probably lived in the walls on the pipes all winter and had to come out once their wee mice tootsies got too warm. We trapped two and managed to freak a third out enough that we haven’t seen it since.

But then, just when we thought we had dealt with our own minor set of Capitol Hill pecadillos and could keep on keepin’ on for several more months my husband and I began to itch. We were itching big red welts that, despite changing detergents and soaps and anything else we could think of kept on comin’ on. By this time, we had begun to think of the alley outside our unit as its own entity – as something which challenged us by throwing plague like happenings our way and so, when the rash didn’t go away, we blamed the alley and laughed. We ate in our favorite vegetarian restaurant and walked to the new art museum opening and tried to forget the ever-increasing list of our Cap Hill woes.

But it wasn’t just a rash, it was bed bugs.

After the night when we discovered the presence of these little monsters living at the head of our box spring and our surrepticious disposal of the box spring in one of the above mentioned dumpsters, we fled to Aurora, my husband’s homeland, and into the warm, easy, open arms of my mother-in-law. Our landlord is letting us out of the lease and we have decided to leave Cap Hill, like so many before us, and join the as yet unnamed young parent diaspora.

And that is why now I sit here looking a the three bed 1980s ranch in Arvada, or the recently built two bed town home in Wheat Ridge. I keep tricking myself thinking that I see interesting crown molding, or subway tiled bathrooms or even, if you look at it just right, a Craftsman bungalow. But I know it is just a trick of my imagination and all of my cool-urban-parent dreams that have gone down the drain. I try to comfort myself with how close we will be to Targets and Costcos and grocery stores, oh my! Yet, it does little good. I know what the suburbs are like, I grew up there.

There is another part to all of this which makes me more than a little sad. It is the part which knows that some of our friends and family would love, at this point to say, “I knew it!” Not because they would be wrong (there is certainly a huge degree of blindness both my husband and I took part in when we decided to move to Cap Hill) but because the inner city turns out to be just exactly what everyone thinks that it is: not a good place for kids, or, for that matter, most adults. It is a harsh life and when you don’t have the comforting balm of going to the bars every night to take the edge off, it just starts to seem dirty, decrepit and even scary.

I wish that it could be different. I wish that whatever attracts hipsters to places like Cap Hill didn’t also attract high crime rates, run down buildings and drug activity. But then, I guess Cap Hill would be just like the suburbs, and there wouldn’t be ANY place left where you could get a decent cup of coffee.