Word: suburbia
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...stuff of a full-size van hidden under the hood of a minivan--arrived when our son turned six. It turned me into a soccer dad, ferrying him and countless of his friends to school and Little League and all the other appointed rounds of the busy childhood of suburbia (for me, a wondrous place filled with not the wail of ER sirens but the music of kids' bicycle horns...
...Burnett, advertising genius --Willis Carrier, maker of air-conditioning systems --Walt Disney, creator of animation and multimedia empire --Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co. --Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft --A.P. Giannini, architect of nationwide banking --Ray Kroc, hamburger meister --Estee Lauder, cosmetics tycoon --William Levitt, creator of suburbia --Lucky Luciano, criminal mastermind --Louis B. Mayer, Hollywood mogul --Charles Merrill, advocate of the small investor --Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony --Walter Reuther, labor leader --Pete Rozelle, football-league commissioner --David Sarnoff, father of broadcasting --Juan Trippe, aviation entrepreneur --Sam Walton, Wal-Mart dynamo --Thomas Watson Jr., IBM president...
...grownup reader, it's difficult not to interpret Tintin's constant motion as an evasion of mortality. Tintin's metabolism, like that of all other children's book characters, is governed by a simple law: Stop moving and you grow old and die. Archie and Jughead keep driving around suburbia for the very reason that once they stop, settle down and get married, they become subject to the same laws as the rest of us--baldness, fatness and disillusion. The youthful complexion of the comic book character, who never seems to age a single year in all his adventures...
...Suburbia co-opts the grass
...Lawns lost their romantic associations with English manor living years ago. The concept of the lawn is now a thoroughly American one and one thoroughly devoid of romance. A mental image of suburbia literally couldn't exist without the lawn (and the fat balding man standing around in his boxers, watering it with a flaccid garden hose, but more on that later) --suburbs were in fact designed around lawns. Jenkins describes the flight to suburbia and the ascendancy of the single-family home with front yard as "the most characteristic single feature of European settlement in North America...