The Road Taken

How do we create a new home for ourselves without forgetting the place that wil l always be home?

- Dwight Garner

THERE’S A FUNNY AND PARTICULARLY American moment in Bruce Springsteen’s recent memoir, Born to Run, in which he describes how his parents and younger sister moved from New Jersey to California in 1969, leaving him behind, at nineteen, to tend to his fledgling music career. Like East Coast Okies, Springsteen writes, they pointed their 1960s Rambler west and ended up in Sausalito. It was an arty and expensive town near San Francisco and clearly not for them. So they pulled into a gas station, and Springsteen’s mother asked the attendant, “Where do people like us live?”

Where do people like us live? It’s a paradigmatic American question, alongside the one that the former New York City mayor Ed Koch used to ask every day: “How’m I doin’?” The answer depends on how you define the word us. There’s a dismal narrative right now, after the election of Donald J. Trump, that posits that there are two opposing Americas, red and blue, brawling like tattooed UFC fighters. There’s a small spark of truth to that narrative. But most of us sense, correctly, that we live somewhere in the middle. We’re uncertain where we stand economically, politically, and socially. The last may prompt the most confusion. When Mrs. Springsteen got out of her car to ask “Where do people like us live?” she was talking about social class. And talking about social class is something that America has failed to do.