City Mouse and Country Mouse

City Mouse and Country Mouse: that’s how my friend Kevin put the differences between my son and his (both are closing in on two years old) when we visited them over the weekend in their beautiful little town on Tomales Bay in Northern California.

I had commented on our cultural differences before after our last visit. I was particularly concerned because my son Nico seemed terrified… of grass. Seriously. Their yard is pretty well maintained, and the lawn is hardly feral at six inches high. But that’s a lot higher than our green-suited friends keep the grass in Central Park. And judging by his response, Nico seemed to think the lawn might swallow him whole.

Unlike me, my kids don’t pretend to be anything other than city kids. When we went camping along the Appalachian Trail last year with the same family, Dalia–then 3 years old–woke up, walked out of her tent and smiled: “let’s go for a walk around the block!” This delighted the assorted Virginians, of course, because that’s exactly the kind of rube-ness they frequently get accused of.

But there’s more than just kids saying the darndest things. As the woman who married me pointed out on the drive down to LA yesterday, traveling is important in part because it reminds us of other ways of living, other lives we might be leading. We never intended to be New Yorkers. My wife, despite not being white, had a dream to own a horse and live an upscale ranch life straight out of a J. Crew catalog. I had a dream to raise my kids, as two generations before me have done, on the sun-blasted rock known as Key West. It was a dream that involved a lot more weed and noontime beer than currently populates my life.

So we got a little misty about the idea of living rural this weekend. We went to beaches. We breathed some remarkably fresh ocean air. I nearly rented a board and got surfing again. Who needs rats the size of kittens, gray snowbanks pocked with mastiff turds, screeching killer subway cars?

Besides, don’t country mice turn out haler and more grounded? Perhaps. Kevin is a stay-at-home dad these days, and an incredible one at that. He used to work with horses, and you can tell he’s a kid-whisperer too. He took Dalia through the ice plant to pick the purple flowers. He helped Nico climb a sandstone rock. If this were a democracy, my kids might have voted him Dad at the end of the weekend.

But not every small-town kid has a Kevin. On our long drive, we stopped for pizza in Paso Robles, a lovely California town, with aggie roots and a boost from wine dollars. But as we were leaving the pizzeria, I had to wait for a very long time in line at the restroom for a young junkie to finish doing his thing (to all our junkie/former junkie readers, can someone tell me why it takes so very, very long–do you have to wait out the whole frigging high in the can?).

Instantly, I remembered something I had forgotten this weekend: some of the most desperate souls I’ve ever known have been country mice. City mice aren’t the only ones with problems.

And the opposite is also true: Raise ’em right, and good things could happen (though they don’t always). That’s true no matter where you are.