Life and Death in the American Suburbs

Kid life is fast. More is happening than the mind can hold. You are sitting in a daydream in a chair while outside the window a bird is whistling a tune you never hear. You get lost in your own thoughts for a few minutes and the bird’s song has come and gone. Kid life is one of those evanescent birdsongs you need to pay attention to while it lasts. You go out of town on a business trip, and you come back and the little boy you knew is gone and has been replaced by someone older, with more of an edge, taller, or a vessel for a new kind of emotion that wasn’t there before, sarcasm, or wisdom. Baby time is even faster. One week a four-legged animal is living in your house, the next week he’s two-legged. One week a silent movie, the next a talkie.

When Paul and I met, we were far from kid life. We were on adult time. Kids are valuable clocks to have around. They are living chronometers. Three is very distinguishable from four. Forty-seven from forty-eight, not so much. Kids are more accurate measuring sticks. The next decade of life for Paul and me after we met was lovely and deep, like woods. Important choices were made. Yet looking back there from here much of the drama was in the slow logic of figuring out how and why. We came to be married and to have kids more at the speed of tortoises than hares. Now we have the benefit of knowing where we were tending, as we were making things up as we went along. We can find the kid time hidden in the adult time leading to Walter and Glenn.

Glenn and Bette powerfully reclaimed their places at the center of the action, mostly because of destiny, and because of choices made by me, and even more by us as a couple.

The year after we met, or met again, or really met, Paul left his job at Riverside Church to become the associate dean of the chapel at Princeton University. His portfolio most prominently included interfaith relations among the students of many faiths, a different interpretation of the job from older eras at Princeton when “chaplain” simply meant upper-level management of the mandatory Christian chapel worship sessions. The new appointment was another test for us. Paul would need to be in his stone turret office on the idyllic watercolor of a campus five days a week. He would be given an apartment in a lovely Victorian house, with front porch, on an equally idyllic leafy street, across from more gray stone buildings, redolent of books and lots of cognition. The plan of action was that he would travel back and forth in his now Volvo to the city. Yet both of us knew that such optimistic plans had a way of not working out.

As the closest thing to a spouse, I was invited to accompany him on his campus visit, after he was hired. We stayed at the Nassau Inn. At around seven o’clock we walked down Nassau Street. “Did you notice that everyone we’ve passed is eating an ice cream cone?” I asked. I was barely exaggerating, and the sci-fi eeriness of life in the rarified small town struck both of us.

Our best-laid plan worked better than most. Paul was indefatigable, or restless, enough to accomplish the two-hour drive, so we stayed together in my MacDougal Street attic of an apartment more than we had when he was uptown. One casualty was his lovely Princeton apartment, which never came together, more grad-student than dean in its feel, a lonely refrigerator in the kitchen holding only a cup of iced coffee or a jar of mayonnaise. I was part of the problem, as much as I admired the faculty I met and the conversations to be had, the stimulation, and the students, too, far from the F. Scott Fitzgeralds I’d imagined, so international and so serious in their ambitions. Yet, as Paul liked to point out, I came to Princeton only three times in his eight-year tenure, and then, only because he was hosting a dinner party or a book event for me. The long, studious shadows at nightfall were too much for a slightly glossy city boy to appreciate. Except as a test that wound up surprisingly easy for us to pass, Princeton did not figure tremendously in the life we became.

More crucial were my parents, who I had been pushing to the margins for decades. During the time of Paul’s tenure at the university, Glenn and Bette powerfully reclaimed their places at the center of the action, mostly because of destiny, and because of choices made by me, and even more by us as a couple. They were becoming frail and ill. During the first few years with Paul, I only visited them according to a firmly maintained regimen at Thanksgiving, Christmas, sometimes Easter. I rode home on the same local Martz bus I had taken eagerly as a teenager in the opposite direction, to New York City, to go to musicals or buy a Village Voice. With Howard, I had felt the need to introduce him quickly to my parents, to bring the boyfriend home, even if we maintained a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to the setup. By the time of Paul, I no longer felt an introduction or parental approval mattered anymore; and, of course, they had been through Howard and his death, so I was a little wary of the darkly unspoken memories, the compare-and-contrast. I suppose I felt some self-conscious stage fright.

The screw turned during my Thanksgiving trip in 2007. I began to realize that Mom and Dad had crossed almost simultaneously into some twilit zone, and it was not clear who was farther gone, though both were keeping up the appearance as much as possible of holding themselves together. First clue: When my father drove me home from the bus station, he could not figure out whether to turn right or left at a well-worn, familiar intersection. He would not let me drive. Nor the next night when he insisted on taking us out to dinner at a tinny T.G.I. Fridays in a shopping mall and evidently felt he was suddenly lost in a dark, enchanted wood while trying to drive his way home through Green Acres, the very manageable suburban development where they lived. The next day my mother made a rendition of a Thanksgiving dinner using a toaster because their stove had crashed months before. The cupboards were nearly bare. I walked to a 7-Eleven some blocks away to buy them staples. That gesture alone was felt by them as an infraction, an accusation. I called Paul and told him he must meet my parents and invited him for Christmas, obviously a self-serving move, as I needed help, yet also a sincere wish for him to get to see even this Scotch-taped together facsimile of who they had once been.

Who they had been was nearly as erased as where they had been. The Wilkes-Barre I grew up in was a large city with an active downtown. Our suburban town of Kingston, across the Susquehanna River, had an optimistic, futuristic veneer with its new ranch and split-level houses and postwar adult toys like finned cars and color TVs. Both my grandfathers had been coal miners. My mother’s father died young of black lung. Yet much of the solid infrastructure of the city, the overly grand granite bridge with tall pylons topped by carved eagles that linked Wilkes-Barre and Kingston, or the showy mansions of the coal barons along the river, was built from their hard labor. Innocent of much of this history and carrying forth the mindset of the early 1960s was “The Parade of Progress,” held each year in the Kingston Armory, which I looked forward to more than to any Barnum and Bailey circus. At one of these international sales fairs, I met the Tunisian ambassador who regularly sent me foreign stamps for my collection.

My father embodied all the recalibrations of class and fortune underway at the time. The son of an immigrant Welsh coal miner, he was rising step by step from accountant to president and CEO of a public utility company. Causing friction with his sisters, he switched his politics to Republican away from the Democratic Party of his union-organizer father. I remember my parents as almost glamorous going out of an evening, he in his navy blue suit with a Windsor knot tie, she in her red tissue-paper-like dress, carrying a box-shaped glass purse. Yet much was inexplicable. I do remember them making out on the living room sofa. Yet I also remember my mother dressing me up to take with her on a bus to my father’s office Christmas party, where wives were not allowed. She wished to stage a protest. My father and I had our conflicts. He erupted whenever helping me with math homework. He came to despise my hippie long hair. Yet these were small tensions, no tragic gestures. I simply always felt an unnamed suspense. Our family of three never quite added up. And now it hardly mattered. Wilkes-Barre had lost its élan after a valley-wide flood in 1972; the brain drain of my generation off to college; a hollowing out of industry. Center City was silent except for drug dealers in deluxe cars driving round at night. My parents were visibly rusting.

Even though his mind was shredded, I felt us having some of our closest conversations sitting in a hallway, he in his wheelchair, me asking him about serving in World War II.

Paul drove into Wilkes-Barre from Princeton on Christmas Day after the chapel service and dropped his bags at a forlorn motor lodge on Public Square, Christmas carols dragging at slow speed on its sound system, and swung by my parents. If I felt Walter and Marylu were my wish parents, Paul speedily established himself as my parents’ wish son. He was better at holiday cheer. He brought vases of red poinsettias taken from the high altar after the service. My parents loved them because they were from Princeton, and they were free. (Both had typical depression-kid attitudes about frugality.) My father approvingly walked to the curb to examine Paul’s new BMW. (Whatever trait, or temperament, is revealed by regularly changing cars, and, at that point, apartments and jobs, Paul had.) He went on my father’s tour of the ranch house and marveled at its knotty pine woodwork and at a framed photo of Stonehenge with jet plane casting a shadow from overhead, proudly snapped by my father. “Eddie Haskell,” I taunted from across the room, a reference to the smarmy kiss-ass friend in the fifties TV show Leave It to Beaver, which I knew my father would not get, though I’m not sure Paul did either. Whatever filter my father kept intact was mostly gone now that he was in his late eighties, and declining. Sitting in a wide swivel chair, he said to me, of six foot five Paul, in a loud theatrical aside, as if only audible to me, “He’s tall…almost too tall.”

The timing of this visit proved prescient. A few weeks later while I was lecturing on the Beat Generation at the state university in New Jersey where I was teaching, my BlackBerry flashed red. I listened to a message from the local police department about an incident involving front doors locked on each other, a call from my mother to 911, all difficult to unravel, more so when I phoned home. Neither sounded in their right mind. An appointment was made with their doctor. I needed to drive there the next day, borrowing Paul’s car. Snow was falling treacherously in the Poconos. The doctor gently suggested assisted living and tests. My father forcefully pushed back and soon was shouting. I needed to return by sunset (a night class perhaps?) yet found a time in about an hour for helpers from Home Instead to come by to meet my parents and make plans to begin delivering food. Or that was the prescription, upended by my father who swore he would never let them in the house. “You’ve only seen the Poconos from the back of a Martz bus,” said my mother, worried about my spotty driving, as I climbed behind the wheel and guiltily set off.

All was crazy. And only grew more so. They could no longer figure out how to push the buttons on the microwave to prepare the meals I had delivered to them. The tea kettle I bought with the biomorphic handle for easier holding burned on the stove, nearly causing a fire. After a few freakish phone calls when my father did not seem able to come to the phone, Paul and I made an emergency visit, an intervention. We found him prone in bed, parched, lots of furnishings overturned in the bedroom. Where was my mother sleeping? “He saw how much attention I was getting for my back,” she said of her now-hunched form, implying his dehydration and lapsed mental state was somehow all an act. A doctor lived next door.

I went to ring his bell. By the end of the afternoon, my father was being carried out, howling, to an ambulance, its revolving light casting eerie, red, holiday-like shadows through the drawn living room drapes. “He’ll never return here,” said the doctor clinically. Clear words that I heard clearly.

He never did return. From the hospital, he was removed in another ambulance to a senior living center. By now spring had turned into summer. Because he was in an unchecked rage, or out of his mind from dementia, or from rage, he was placed in a lockdown unit I found reminiscent of scenes from Marat/Sade, at least as I remembered the film adaptation my flexible mother took me to at my insistence when I was in high school. The center was on a knoll overlooking the Susquehanna River in a suburban community, yet I found nothing but horror inside. When I would appear, many gray-haired elderlies would push forward, most in wheelchairs, to see if I was someone for them. Filling my head with literary references to keep some distance, I thought of Odysseus visiting the underworld and coming across the shade of his mother shuffling toward him among the rest of the dead. My father’s face melted like wax when he saw that I was there to see him. Even though his mind was shredded, I felt us having some of our closest conversations sitting in a hallway, he in his wheelchair, me asking him about serving in World War II. “You’d think someone could have done better than that,” he said, pointing at the cheap seam joining a ceiling to a wall of glass. For once, we were in complete agreement.

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Excerpt from the book Good Morning Moon: A Snapshot of an American Family by Brad Gooch. Copyright ©2026 by Brad Gooch. Used with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.