The Wife picked the neighborhood we live in. It's nice, comfortable.
I grew up in a much different place. It was a classic postwar housing tract in the San Fernando Valley. It was working class, with mothers at home with the kids and fathers at work. My mother was the only woman on our block to divorce and raise her kids alone. Although my brother and I had a housekeeper who watched over us (my father's alimony checks paid for this luxury) most of the mothers would not let their kids play at our house.
My block had construction foreman, linemen for the phone company, auto mechanics and even a motorcycle police officer. You could tell the families with something extra by the boats in their driveways.
There are a couple of stretches on Engle that remind me of the neighborhood of my youth, but mostly the area I live in today reminds me of the "expensive" neighborhoods I visited but never felt I belonged in.
My mother had a friend who was a child psychologist. She too was divorced and I suspect that was a major element of their friendship in the early 1960s. She lived in a home in Woodland Hills with two children about my age. My brother and I would go to their home and swim in their pool and play in the large backyard that included a separate barbecue house on the hill overlooking the pool.
The house I grew up in was purchased for something like $14,000. Maybe it was less. What has stuck with me all of these years is that my mother's friend and her kids lived in a house that cost FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Today I looked up my childhood home on Google Maps using street view. It doesn't look anything like it did when I lived there. Long ago someone put in a low scalloped brick fence around the front yard. Cypress trees now tower out of the picture. But parched grass and a discarded sofa on the parkway in front of the house are signs the area isn't as well off as it was when I lived there.
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