69: Dream House

It wasn't Amanda's dream house, it was her mom's. It wasn't what you usually think of as a dream house. Picture 500 people living in a 10 story building, dorm style, in the middle of the city. We were supposed to come for a four day visit and it turned into a two week visit and then like a month visit and then we lived here.

So I never really got to go back and say goodbye to my friends or anything. And I was really mad at my mother for doing that to me and all this type of stuff. And I was just really mad at everybody and didn't like it here at all. We're.

The move is an experiment in communal living that's been going on for 25 years here in Chicago. No one owns private property. Everything's shared, the TVs, the cars, everything. If you need pocket change, you go to a room called the money office.

If they've got cash, they'll give it to you. Remember, this is 500 people. And while this is starting to sound like a big socialist collective in the middle of 1990s neoconservative, neoliberal, neo everything, America. Let me have one more fact to make this picture complete.

This community, it's Christian, run by a group called Jesus People usa. All I did was sit up in my room and just stare out the window. I did not come down to eat or anything. I just sat there and stared out the window because I was so angry that I was just gonna kill anybody that bothered me.

And I did that for like the first few days, like first three days. Now it's 16. A year and a half after they moved here. Manda says she doesn't think herself as a Christian anymore, which understand we have set her mother who moved her partly so Amanda would live in a Christian environment or in Christian values.

Sometimes it's a tense between them. Like if I was in church and I didn't take communion or something, then all that day I'd like ask her a question. She's like, you know, I just can't think right now. I just can't imagine you going to hell and all this type of stuff, you know.

So I just, I think she's really concerned about me, but she's just gonna have to live with it, you know? Though the setting of the story is fairly exotic, this ODAQ is not an unusual American story. How many of our parents move to some new place, some dream house, some vision of a new life somewhere else, moving the family with them, hoping it would work out for the kids. In the last half of the century, as American families have settled new suburbs as families migrated because of layoffs and divorces, what story could be more common?

And often it works out fine. Amanda's the exception of Jesus, People community. Most of the teenagers living there they liked a lot, it seems. And like any good parent, Amanda's mom consulted with Amanda about the move.

Amanda even agreed to move. The final decision wasn't hers. That's one thing I really get angry with, is I don't feel like I can make my own choices a lot of times. But that's what happened when you're 16.

I guess everyone's like, well, that's just being a teenager. And I'm like, it stinks. I hate being a teenager. Welcome to WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International.

It's American Life. I'm a replies teacher. Can I programmatize some theme? Invite a variety of writers and performers and documentary producers to tackle that theme.

Today's show Dream House stories about parents who had some utopian vision for their family's future and who built their dream houses to try and realize their future. Act 1 Nina's Adventure A family dreams of life in rural Maine, moves there from the city and then, well, things start getting complicated. Act 2 Blue Sky Dream author David Beers explains the gorgeous modern vision that drew his parents and tens of thousands of other young families to California in the 1950s and 60s to work in aerospace and what happened when they arrived. Stay with us.

Act One In 1976, Mima Spodella's parents decided to move from the Upper west side of Manhattan, where her father was a math teacher, out of the city to build a house in Maine. It turned out to be a pivotal and redefining change in all their lives. Mima prepared this story about her family's move. It's partly the story of her parents dreams and partly the story of her own.

I don't have to guess what my parents dreamed for her family when they moved us from New York City to Maine. They wrote it all down in a book. My mother actually wrote an Entire children's story, 83 pages long. My dad did the illustrations and I picked the title Mima's Adventures.

I was six. Chapter one of Mima's Adventures at Home. Mima lived in New York City. Her apartment was on the 13th floor of a great tall building on the windiest corner in all of the city.

In the spring when she wrote this, the winter before we left, my mom was getting her master's degree in education. She thought that her move raised some interesting questions about early childhood development. Like how you help children deal with the consequences of their parents decisions. Mom writes in the introduction.

In thinking how best to prepare my children, and indeed my husband and myself, I came upon the idea of creating a story that we might, when the move comes, actually reenact. Okay. Chapter four. Coming to the Mountain the day the green pickup truck finished its long drive was sunny, cool and breezy.

The sun was setting rapidly behind pond and over the mountains. Mommy and Daddy hoped to arrive just at this time and no later so they could unload the truck and settle themselves nicely before dark. Of course there was no house here yet. It was.

It was raining when we arrived. The air was thick with mosquitoes. The grass was about 3ft high and soaking wet. And the truck got stuck as soon as we pulled off the road.

That's my dad with a real beginning to our adventure in Maine. It was really his dream that got this started. For seven years he'd been working as an administrator and teacher at a private school in New York. He didn't want to do that anymore.

He was living the wrong life. He envisioned a homestead in the country with farm animals, gardens, maybe a windmill. Perfectly self sustaining and efficient. I had this.

I had this sense that I wanted to do something in my life that was that I had more control over. I was feeling like I wanted to work on something that felt more like it was mine. And I suppose I really wanted to build something. Also very hands on experience of building.

Well, dad said we could build a house. So of course again, coming from apartment living. Build a house. I just thought that meant, you know, like a.

The wildest thing I could think of was kind of like a suburban tract house, you know, where you come in with a key and the toilets are there, the water set up, the plumbing, the lights, heat. You never imagined. It never occurred to me. It didn't occur to me and I don't think it occurred to dad to mention to me, well, you know, that means we have to dig a well, we have to deal with electricity.

It didn't occur to me. Her dream of our life and name was this. She'd bake bread, put up preserves, raise the kids. My mom was a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx.

Turret seemed like a great idea and it didn't seem far fetched. Dad was a country boy. His father built their house. He grown up with pigs and chickens in rural Rhode Island.

But let's make this clear. Here was his plan. We'd live in a tent while he Built a house from scratch, completely by himself on a raw piece of land on a mountain in the middle of Maine in one summer. So that was the plan and it didn't seem crazy at all.

We were very clear that it was an adventure and that some people envied us. We actually thought everybody envied us. Did we ever think anybody thought we were nutty? No, we never did.

But we thought people envied us very. This whole thing was very naive. Just no concept of how our lives would change at all. Our lives didn't just change.

For me, it's the beginning of everything, of who I am, of who my family is today. Four years into the project, the house wasn't finished and my parents were separated. My mother moved out. My younger brother Emilio and I stayed with the house with dad.

21 years later, my mother, brother and I live in cities as far from rural living as you can get. My father is remarried and is the last one of us living in the house. It still isn't finished. Okay, well first of all, like, who are these people?

I'm looking at dad with a mustache and Emilio as like as a three year old or four year old and it's. Is that me? That's you. That's you.

Wow. It's wow. I'm sorry to keep saying wow, but this truth is like who are these people? I look through photos with my mom of our first summer in Maine.

We seem so optimistic and playful in these pictures. Our family before the fall. Mom and dad are young, good looking, working on the building site together. Emilio and I eat breakfast outside the tent and help hammer nails.

There's one of us posing proudly in front of our new outhouse. I remember one time, it's a great time when I was working on cutting a swath through the brush to put the road in and it was raining and had been raining and raining for days and things had gotten pretty muddy and you kids were completely naked and he was sliding around in the mud and covered with mud and I wanted somebody to come up to look at the possibly building a foundation for us. And he happened to arrive just as you kids came sliding down through the mud. He'd driven as far as he could up in his truck and got out and walked.

And so he was confronted first with a wet mudd kids screaming and laughing. I went running past them down the path and. And then I came out. Yeah, and I came out wearing like shorts and no shirt, holding my machete and covered with like little bits of leaves because like when I'd be chopping things up with a machete.

Like little leaves would be flying all over the place. And it was wet, so they were stuck to me all over my body and my face. I had a little piece of leaves all over me. Looked a little starry.

I couldn't have been happier. If dad's dream was to have a project of his own. I had my own six year old dream. Little House on the Prairie.

And I'm not talking about that horrible TV series. I mean the books that Laura Ingles Wilder wrote about her family's experience of moving west, building a home and surviving blizzards, droughts, marauding wolves and illnesses in New York. I'd been obsessed with little house books and would act out scenes from them with friends in Maine. I have to play Laura every day.

I saw everything through the filter of the Little House books. I picked blueberries up on the mountain and mom would make a batch of pancakes over the camp stove. Dad would cut two by fours for the house and I'd stand by and hand the nails. I felt like I had arrived.

Okay, so in my. In my mythology of our summer, the summer of 76, it was like you were. You were pa, Laura's pa and I was Laura. And it was like you were.

You were being this pioneer man. You were a big hero. And I was like the. I was the little helper.

That's what I felt like. Well, it's not. It's not that far from the truth. I think a lot of people thought of him as a big hero for doing this.

Our friends in New York City thought it was an extraordinary adventure and. And I was probably the only one who didn't think I was a hero. I was like filled with anxiety that I wasn't telling anybody about because I realized that I had undertaken a pretty near impossible task. When I was writing Mima's adventures.

It was before we did it, so the time frame is totally wacky and unrealistic. Chapter six. Moving in. Mima opened her eyes.

Outside the tent, birds were singing their cheery morning wake up songs. While inside the tent, Mima la snuggled in her sleeping bag. She was thinking about the day ahead. Today they would finally move into the new house.

The morning was cool and sunny with summer in its last days in Maine. Soon the tent would. In fact, when summer was in its last days, we had only a hole in the ground. There was no floor, no walls, no roof, no house.

When I look back now, I think the moment the ominous music starts is here. Do you remember not to bring up Sad stuff. But do you remember Jamie? The puppy?

Yeah, maybe the one I ran over. He was sleeping under the truck. I started it up and he didn't wake up. And I didn't know he was there.

I felt pretty bad about. Just seemed like this. It was like the first tragedy of the summer or something. It was like, yeah, something.

Something that seemed so nice had gone very wrong. Yeah, it feels bad thing about it. Now this is from chapter seven. At home again.

Winter evenings in the new house were cozy and warm. Mommy and Daddy had finished building the stone fireplace. So now after dinner every night, they all settled in the living room. The warmth and color of its fire cheered and relaxed everyone.

The bright new wooden. In reality, when the first Snow came on October 3, we were still living in the tent. And believe me, there was nothing cozy about it. The only thing we could do was set up camp in the unfinished house.

There were no windows. There were window openings cut, but no windows. And the openings were covered with plastic. The fourth wall was plastic, right?

Oh, that's right. That's right. On the south side, not a very secure house and impossible to heat. It was just a shell really.

And it already had started to snow and I got kind of concerned because we were going to sleep immediately after dinner and all of us were wearing hats and gloves and coats and scarves. I felt like we were hibernating. Mom said something about feeling like, you know, she would come home from work and we would all like eat and then we were all dressed in our coats and our hats and our mittens and we would just get into bed and it was like we were hibernating. Oh, that's interesting.

I don't. I don't remember. I honestly don't remember. I would drive home from work and through Camden and on the way home to Lean Mill and I would see the lights, you know, like 4:00', clock, 4:30 in the afternoon, lights would start coming on in the houses and I would just sort of felt like I was out of Dickens or something, you know.

Oh, a house, a real home. And it started getting cold and we decided, well, really mom, push this wisely, that we should not go any further without getting another place for winter. I just felt like it's really important, I think, that we find a place where we can have a cabin and really have warmth and light. It didn't need to be necessarily electric stuff, but a closed up house.

Yeah, that's not a lot to ask. Well, at that point it kind of felt like it was being a little Bit of a lot to ask. It was impossible to stay. We moved out of the house to a small summer cabin a few miles away.

The pipes there were frozen, so there was no running water. A word now about where this adventure took place. Searsmont, Maine, population 500. You've never heard of it?

You didn't go to camp there. Don't think LLP and Cannabunport think Appalachia. Heart Scrapple. Not quaint.

And my dad's plan in the middle of this was to do everything himself. At one point, he spent a week at the bottom of a 30 foot hole with a pickaxe trying to dig a well. We didn't have electricity or a phone then. Nothing came easy here.

Sometimes when people go after a dream like this, they make an innocent decision for innocent reasons that has profound consequences. I wanted a view and I just thought, well, I just didn't understand what difference it would make. But I think everyone was a might surprise that we built like right up the farthest spot up on the hill, you know, just really way up. And that's where dad, you know, dad fit right in.

And he indulged those fantasies because he said, hey, great idea. Sure, we can build up there. Let me explain because this might not seem like a big deal. A view means back from the road, which in our case means back from the road past the field, up through the brushing trees on the side of the mountain, which means a really long driveway.

And when I say driveway, it doesn't exactly capture this. There should be another word for what this was. During the winter, when Emilio and I would get home from school, the sun would be setting and we'd struggle up to the house through drifted snow. My parents couldn't get the cars up, so they'd walk up and down tearing supplies and groceries on the sled.

Once it was totally iced over and we could barely walk up and down for parts of the driveway, we literally had to crawl on our hands and knees. And I remember once, and this seemed straight out of some arctic expedition, late at night, Emilio and I were so tired, we tried to lie in the snowbanks to rest. My dad pulled out our arms and yelled at us, get up or we'd freeze to death. We all had to deal with that driveway.

But it was the worst for my dad. There was one particular day when it snowed and I really feel like something came over dad. It was like this battle with nature and that he was going to win and he didn't. He started at the top.

We must have been Snowed in at the top. He started to shovel all the way down. And it took him hours and hours and hours. Of course, it was still snowing, and it was very difficult to reason with him of, let's, you know, your tracks are being totally covered, and this is kind of a blizzard and it's windy.

And by the time he got. I don't think he ever quite, quite got to the bottom. He was just exhausted and wiped out. It was dark.

And then, you know, he trudged back up the hill. It was like, all blown over. It was a whole day's work that really, really did nothing. It's amazing that with all the construction and machinery, my dad's general frenzy, that he didn't kill himself.

There was a series of accidents. He cut his nose on barbed wire, hammered his nose, fell off station two times, broke several ribs, collapsed along, nearly ruptured his spleen. And then there was the worst of all. We had been out for the day, and we came back and it was towards evening, it was dusk, and I decided that I should cut up some wood so that the whole day shouldn't be just used up on frivolous stuff, that I should do some work that I was trying to keep myself very disciplined about getting a certain amount of work done.

And I hadn't cut up enough wood. So I said I would just work on that a little bit. And I was trying to do it very fast because it was getting dark, and I set myself a certain amount to do. And I was just standing in the pile of wood cutting, which is a bad way to do it, and kicking aside the cut end pieces as they.

As they dropped off, and my foot rolled on one of them. I fell forward into the pile with the chainsaw out in front of me. The tip hit the pile and kicked back. And as I fell forward, it turned around and the blade faced me and it.

And it caught me under the chin. Oh, God. Missing. Cutting my throat open by just inches.

It would have been terrible. Your life would have been completely different. I. I thought I cut my throat open.

Um, I remember bits and pieces, and I remember the. The. The sort of ragged pink flesh that hung under his chin. That's my brother Emilio.

He's 25 now. He was about 5 at the time. I remember mom packing towels against his neck and wringing out one of the towels before driving to the hospital. Wringing out the blood.

Wringing out the blood. Right. And I don't remember any specifics after that, but you don't remember him coming in and saying, I remember him coming in the door with his hand over his neck and blood just gushing out. And he said, maddie, I caught myself.

Oh, God. It's just like that voice that. Those words. Oh, God, it was so scary.

I just thought, what else would you think? Dad's gonna die, right? If my dad had his dream of a rural homestead, and my mom had her dream of being earth mother, and I had my little house on the prayer fantasy. What's interesting is that Amelia had no dream about her move to Maine.

He was just four, and as best as any of us can figure, he was the only one of us who didn't see the whole experience through a romantic haze. By August, that first summer, he was asking dad, when are we gonna go home? Meaning home to our apartment in New York. And dad had to tell him, we are home.

So I. I had an interesting discussion with dad about bravery, about bravery versus insanity. Was he crazy or was he brave? Was he hero or was he insane?

Where'd you come down on that? It's very interesting because the framing of the question is retelling of sort of your. Your vision of him that I don't quite get. I mean, for myself, and I get it.

But I hesitate to say that's the sort of the little girl vision of the father, but it definitely is. I just don't remember him as being crazy or insane or. What was the other choice? Heroic.

I remember spending a lot of time with him and being part of his kind of everyday building of the house particularly. I remember lunches down at Sparrow Lumber and just a lot of time to just be with him and just riding around in the green truck with him and sort of being his sidekick and never thought of Ms. Harak talking to Amelia. I was surprised.

I hadn't really thought about this, but it's no accident that my mom called the book Mima's Adventures. This was my dream, not Emilio's. So I. I read Mima's Adventures with Mom.

Do you want to hear a little bit from me? Please? Yeah. Okay.

This is in the section when mom and dad are telling us that we're going to be leaving New York. And we're overjoyed, I'm sure. And we are. Oh, we are overjoyed.

Yes. Revisionist history. Oh, yay. Oh, this is so much fun.

And then, will we ever come back to the city to live? Mima asked quietly, turning to Daddy. To be honest, sweetheart, I don't know. The city is a good place to live in and grow, and so is the country we've been in the city for a long time and life has been very happy.

It's cold in Maine, said Emilio. I don't want to be cold. Yes, the winters in Maine, are cold, said Daddy. But we'll have a good hot wood stove for indoors and layers and layers of clothing for outdoors.

You won't be cold, Emilio. You'll be snug as a bug. I wouldn't mind the winter. I really wanna have some animals, said Mima.

And a puppy? Asked Emilio. I think we surely could, said Mommy. And Daddy will run over it with the truck.

For Amelia and me, the move to Maine was the central fact of our childhood, one of the central forces shaping who we are as we've grown up. We found we both have our father's mania when it comes to taking on big projects. We both work ourselves, literally to the point of entry. As a teenager, Emilio tried to embrace rural life.

He threw himself into rock climbing, got wilderness first aid certification, led hiking trips. He was as obsessive about rock climbing as my dad was about building the house. Here's another thing that I think about. Are we city kids?

Are we country kids? Oh, well, I definitely decided I was a city kit at the height of my attempt to become a wilderness triple eater. And I was cultivating a very natural sort of adventurous personality at Swarthmore and leading the rock climbing club and going on lots of hikes. And I went on.

I skipped my final exam study period when I was 19 and I went to go for a week long hike somewhere in the Shenandoahs, I think. And about three days into it, I realized that against every, every sort of instinct that I had and every wish that I had for myself to be a rugged outdoorsman, that I was really a city kit. And it came out of nowhere. And I remember feeling upset about it.

On par with, you know, the, the realization that I was possibly gay at 16. I mean, they're very similar. Sort of that moment at which the self, your self image and your self knowledge have nothing to do with each other. Factor dimensionally posed, but.

So I'm a city kid. Emilio's moving back to New York to get his PhD in anthropology, just six blocks from where we lived on the upper west side, 460 miles away from our house in Maine. It feels like. Feels like a person rather than a thing.

Feels like a member of the family to me. I feel like I would be really heartbroken if, if, if it were sold. I'd be really heartbroken. I don't think there's any Danger of anyone ever buying that house.

Stop. Or worse, what if I bought the land and tore down the house? Right, Exactly. I feel like I would fling myself upon the machinery and do not.

Do not take the house. Whereas I would feel in some way that I could finally get on with my life. So that's the there's the difference. Meme.

Spittle's story about our families moved to men continues in a minute for a public radio international when our problem continues. This is American Life and my glass. Each week in our program, of course, features a theme bringing with a variety of different kinds of stories on the theme. Today's show, dream house parenting.

Try to build a brighter future for their families and what happens to them when they try. We continue with Mima Spilla story about her parents who moved to Maine and what it did to their family. Just pulled in the driveway here. Starting up the hill should do this radio story.

I went home to Maine for the first time in two years. Oh, God. Where's the house? And dad's home.

Just popped a little. While I'm here, He's playing piano inside. I can hear him out here. That's totally oblivious.

He's playing piano and doesn't even hear me, even though I honked. Sneak in. Come in back. Hey, dad.

You're totally oblivious playing the piano. How did you sneak up on me? I honked. I honked from outside.

While I was home, my dad and I talked constantly about the house, the move, summer of 1976. We'd never talked this much about that time. We walked the boundaries of the 63 acres of land and visited all the old sites where we put the tent, the outhouse. Do you see the rope hanging from the tree?

That was our swing. That was your swing? Yeah, but see, that limb is dead now. You wouldn't want to try swinging on it.

No. Hey, did you know about the thing that Emilio and I that Emilio and I had? The squirrel house? No.

Show me. It wasn't a real squirrel house. It was just. This was a game that we played while you were building your house.

We were building our house and we were the Squirrel family. And it was right over here, sort of. There's this big flat rock. I asked dad to give me a tour of the house as it stands today.

The porch in front is half completed. The floor is unfinished. Sheetrock isn't up in most rooms. The bathroom isn't done yet.

And I guess I hadn't thought about this up until now, but it really embarrasses him these days. My dad's an architect. He took pains to point out he's finished loud houses now, except this one. Yeah.

And the stairs just have wide wood trays. They don't have the hook treads on it they're supposed to get. And this little piece of wall hasn't been Sheetrock yet, but I did run the wiring in it, so now I can put the Sheetrock on it. I didn't have any walls on my bedroom until I was like, 15.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I'm sorry.

That's okay. I survived. And I didn't have a door for a long time. I have a door in my old room now.

It doesn't have a doorknob, so when you close it, it just sort of closes. And then you have to sort of wedge your fingers in and open it up. This is really gonna be on the radio, huh? Sure.

Thanks, Nima. I'm supposed to be an architect now. I know this. This is great advertisement for me.

Can't even finish his own house. While I was home doing these interviews, there were a lot of times that my dad got uncomfortable. And I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't understand why. So I kept pushing him.

And finally, after days of this, he told me something I never understood before. We shared this experience, Mo, but we didn't see it the same way at all. Every time I talked about it as a heroic adventure, he'd just cringe. For years, he saw the move as a grim series of failures.

He dropped out of college, and this was his biggest attempt to redeem himself, to make something of his own. In every snowstorm, broken down car, every unfinished part of the house, every single crisis was a referendum on his character. No matter how desperately he struggled, things kept slipping out of his control. And even as I say this, I feel incredibly resistant to seeing it this way because it means that I have to reconstruct my entire heroic vision of my childhood.

One of the long term effects that I sort of joke about, and it's also true, is that you've set up this kind of ideal of what a man should do that most men couldn't really live up to. And it's again, including me. Including you. Yeah.

Turns out my dad would be more comfortable if I didn't seem as the hero of an adventure story. My agenda isn't to. Isn't to explode your myth, but you did ask me to. To give my version of it because you felt like you mythologized it.

It's funny. It's like people will ask Me also, like, what are your parents like? And, you know, you're. The fact is, you're not, like, a big man.

You're not. How tall are you, Dad? 5 7. Right.

You're not a big guy. You're very. You're strong. You know, you're muscular, but you're not this huge, macho guy.

You know, you were a math teacher. You played piano, but you were just, like, the coolest dad ever. No, really, you were. You.

You. You know, you made a bicycle. You didn't make a bicycle for me, but remember that bike? I got the first bike.

And you painted it red and you wrote Mima on the side. Yes. You. You know, you were just, like, the coolest dad ever.

You did. You built us loft beds in Manhattan, and you. There was a swing in our room and a bar to swing on, and, you know, and then you moved us up to Maine. It was like, how much cooler could you get than that?

It's nice to hear. That's really nice to hear. I didn't know that. Oh, we wanted to know where the outhouse was.

Yes. So we walked to see where the outhouse was, but the structure was gone, and the hole was filled in, healed over like it never existed. My dad told me he doesn't want to be judged on that one period in our lives when we moved to Maine. And I certainly don't want to say, like, this was my life, building this house.

You know, life has many things. There's a lot to it. It's like, you know, having children and raising children and the work I've done and all kinds of things. My relationships, friends, you know, my whole life.

So we're breaking down the. I guess in some ways, maybe I need to diffuse the importance that this has had. Do you know what I mean? Perhaps.

Well, just because it happened at such an important time and it was like, this was my childhood growing. I mean, I don't have many memories before a time when. When this was happening. I mean, this is what I'm from.

This is what I come from. It's this house. It was like the biggest. It was like this family member.

I mean, really, it was so present. But, you know, that's. That's. That's you.

And I don't know that you have to necessarily, like, debunk a myth or anything like that to move on, but for me, what would it be like for me if I just, like, stayed with this as, like, this is the essential thing about me and I didn't do anything else? What would that Be like, then that would be. Then that would be super obsessive. It's just not sufficient either.

It's not enough for me. It's. And it's. And for me, you know, had a different experience of it.

And now for me, I live in it. It's just a commonplace. It's. It's not.

Doesn't remain, doesn't have any of this mythical aura about it. I don't think that's entirely true. For years he couldn't work on the house. He just stopped.

Like if he stopped trying, he'd stop failing. But over the course of talking about this for weeks while I put together this story, something changed. It happened after he told me about feeling like he failed. Somehow after that conversation, it felt like there wasn't anything more to say about that time.

And for the first time in years, my dad started working on the house again. He called me the other night, he said he's already finished the bathroom, put in a beautiful tile floor, replaced the iglio toilet. Sheetrock is going up. Mima Spittle is a documentary filmmaker living in New York, a half hour subway ride from where she was born.

Last night I dreamed that I was a child out where the pines grow wild and tall. I was trying to make it home through the forest I broke through the trees and there in the night my father's house stood shining hard and bright. The branches and brambles tore my clothes and scratched my arms But I ran till I fell shaking in his arms. Tattoo blue sky dream.

Ronald Reagan made my family's tractome into a dream home. Just about the time of his landslide reelection in 1984, Ronald Reagan knocked out the north and west facing walls of our house. He tore out the linoleum floor and the flocked ceiling of the family room. Ronald Reagan gave my mother a kitchen twice the area of the old one.

He gave my father a shop of his own just off the garage. David Beers reading from his memoir Blue Sky Dream. Ronald Reagan built his family dream house by funding the Strategic Defense Initiative Star Wars. David Beers's father was an aerospace engineer.

And back in 1957, after the Russian satellite Sputnik scared the nation into a new defense industry boom. Beer's family joined tens of thousands of others who went to work in aerospace and Northern California. Beer's father worked at Lockey on secret defense projects through the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Though these days it serves as a place of sheer materialism.

Beer's writes that it was not materialism that was attractive to his family when they moved out to the California suburbs. It was the emptiness of the place. It was the fact that you could create new modern lives out there, hopeful lives, crafting new traditions. Geert said at one point his mother actually said that the family was Irish, even though really they were only one fourth Irish.

But let's not let those facts get in the way. My mother decided that a fun thing to be was an Irish Catholic. And so she was determined to invent this Irishness for us in the middle of the Mediterranean California. And so there were leprechauns living in our oleanders.

And when we on St. Patrick's Day, we all lined up in our mother clipped to our little Catholic school red sweaters, these green buttons that said kiss me on Irish and shamrocks with blarney stones. And she avoided altogether some of the other stereotypes of Irishness. The idea of the morose heavy drinker.

Did you just like the parts you liked? Well, that was the great thing about the suburbs in California and anywhere else in the country where this great federal investment in the Cold War infrastructure was going on. These were brand new places. There was the opportunity to invent a culture.

And you constructed that culture with what you had available to you. Can I say to talk for a minute about how you saw your dad when you were a kid? In your book, in your memoir, you describe him. So been seen after scene is showing up with lumber and building stuff and laying down new brick walkways and building a deck behind the house and constantly having one project after another.

At one point, there's nothing my father could not do himself. Apparently he wasn't really successful. I think he spent maybe, you know, six months designing the sprinkler system for the backyard. And when he finally turned it on, it was wonderous to behold.

You know, the rain birds all swept around in their perfect arcs and what have you, but the grass didn't grow. As it turned out, he'd picked the wrong seed for the soil and the water didn't fully cover the ground. And as it turned out, much like the aerospace itself, he had to keep going back and revising his plans. And he went terribly over budget.

But in the end, he got the grass to grow. And that was the main message there, which is that through technology and perseverance, you can accomplish anything. Well, you agree to read a long excerpt from your book Blue Sky Dream. You read about in the book what you call your tribe, the aerospace workers and their families moving to a valley that was first known as the Valley of Hearts.

Delight building a home in a brand new subdivision with the old world named Clarendon Manor. Whenever I think of the house they bought and the developments surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are an aesthetic barrenness to the streets, the lots, the rooms. The snapshots confirm it. There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard, shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake.

In the backyard, nothing but implanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco, an open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation. Didn't the sterility scare the hell out of you? I've often asked my mother.

Didn't you look around and wonder if you'd been stuck on a desert island? The questions never phase her. We were thrilled to death, not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us.

It was a whole new adventure for us, for everyone. Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door, a family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables. Like our owners, having been given the emptiness we long for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.

We were blight conquerors of my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image. We did so with a smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first we would establish a few outposts, a Pentagon funded research university, say, or a bomber command center or a missile testing range.

And then over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to some place like the Valley of Heart's Delight, we did not cause panic in the populace, more likely a flurry of joyous meetings by the chambers of Commerce and Rotary clubs. You can understand then why families like mine tended to behave with a certain hubris. In the spring of 1962.

The Valley of Hearts Delight was covered with blossoms back then. The cherry and plum and apricot trees would froth so white and pink that driving around the place felt like burrowing through cotton candy. Spanish colonizers had planted the first of these glades on warm evenings in the spring of 1962. This is what my father and mother would do after dinner.

They would place my baby sister in her stroller and four of us would sit out from the small used house they were renting, an established Subdivision already half a dozen years old, named Strawberry Park. We would walk six blocks and run out of sidewalk. We would pick up a wide trail cut a foot and a half deep into the adobe ground, a winding road bed and waiting blacktop. At a certain point we would leave the roadbed and make our way across a muddy clay that was crosshatched by tractor treads riven by pipe trenches.

We would marvel at the cast concrete sewer sections lying about gray knee scratching barrels big enough for me to crawl inside. We would breathe in the AAP sense of two by fours stacked around us, the smell of clams ready to go forward. Finally we would arrive at our destination, a collection of yellow and red ribbons tied to small wooden stakes sprouting in the mud. These markers identified the outline of Lot 242 of Unit 6 of Track 3113, exactly 14,500 square feet of emptiness that now belong to us.

All around the outline were piles of cherry and plum and apricot trees, their roots ripped from the ground, the spring blossoms still clinging to their tangled up branches. Our ride evolved with the season. Early on, my father would go from stake to yellow ribbon state, telling us where the kitchen would be, where the front door would go, which windows would be getting the most sun. Later, after the concrete foundation and plywood subflooring were in and the skeletons of walls were up, we would wander through the materializing form of our home, already inhabiting with our imaginations its perfect potentiality.

Within a decade after the coming of aerospace to the Valley of Hearts Delight, developers were shelling out nearly $100,000 per acre for any land left that might still be covered with blossoms. This should give an idea of the quiet force my people exerted whenever they entered a place power enough to undo a century old economy and strip the blossoms from a valley once and for all. My people did sigh at the extinction of those blossoms, but honestly, we did not mourn their disappearance in any deeply felt way. Certainly we didn't feel guilt.

We had not, after all, come to the Valley Hearts Delight to join the circular rhythm of nature. Our imagination was linear, proceeding forward and upward, and our lines did not curve back on themselves as did the seasons. We saw promise in the clean possibilities that arose once every blossom had been erased, never to return. Several valleys over from ours.

Joan Didion watch the coming of my tribe with dread. We moved her to write in a 1965 essay how it felt to be a native daughter, to have come from a family who has always been in the Sacramento Valley, and to see that the boom was on and the voice of the aerospace engineer would be heard in the land. 15,000 aerospace workers, almost all of them imported, had arrived on the outskirts of Sacramento to join Aerojet General, a maker of missile boosters. Joan Didion's family was like the orchard people of the Valley of Heart's Delight, a family tied to agriculture, with a hundred years of circular rhythms behind them.

Hers were a people primly insular and tragic minded. According to the native daughter, her valley was a place where incautious children visiting from out of town often would drown in the river, disappear forever. And the old locals would see a proper lesson in that, would say, as Joan Didion's grandmother did, they were from away. Their parents had no business letting them in the river.

In another essay written five years later, Didion gets at the profound difference between her people and mine. She writes of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lies in not some error of social organization, but in man's own blood. She reveals herself, in other words, to be a pessimist about human endeavor, engineered and executed on a grand scale. How different from my tribe, who would say instead, if incautious children might drown in a river, let us erect a cyclone fence, even drive the river underground, leaving behind a manufactured surface that was dry and safe, empty.

And speaking of promise, that, after all, is what was done with the creek that ran by Clarendon Manor. Within 10 years of my family's arrival, the Valley of Hearts Delight was no longer green. It had become a vast matrix of expressways and freeways and Clarendon Manors, a vast matrix of companies making technology primarily for the government. The population had grown many times over in those 10 years, and we no longer heard the Valley of Hearts Delight called that anymore.

In fact, no one I knew had ever used that sentimental name while I was growing up. My family simply had called it the Valley. Whereas it was officially turned on the government studies and the plans of various developers, Santa Clara Valley. It would not be until a time distant, well into the 1970s, that we would begin calling our home Silicon Valley.

There was yet another rite of spring practice by my family, a rite that became possible once the invasion of my tribe was all but complete, once nearly all the blossoms had been replaced by settlements like our own. On an evening that was bright and windy, but too warm to be winter anymore, my father would come home from Lockheed with a kite or two balsa sticks wrapped tightly with colorful tissue paper. If the next morning was a Saturday, he would put the kites together for us, tear us a Tail from an old sheet, make a string bridle that held the kite just so. Help us launch the kite and send it up over the track tomes for just this very purpose.

My father kept what seemed a mile of twine on an enormous spool. And so the kite would climb higher and higher until it became a shimmying dot against the blue. At that point, my father would go into his garage and make a small parachute. He would unfold a paper napkin and tie its corners to four strands of string, drawing the other ends of the string together and knotting them around a bolt for weight.

He would stick a bit of reinforcing tape in the center of the napkin and pass through that, a bent pin making a hook that poked out of the top of the parachute. Next, my father would write our phone number on the parachute with the words, if found, please call. Ready for takeoff, my father would say as he grabbed hold of the taut, tight string. And then a miraculous thing would happen.

Driven by the wind, the parachute would skitter up the line, joining the kite high in the sky in what seemed an instant. When it reached the top, my father would say, give her a jerk. And the parachute would fall away from the kite and drift in whichever direction the wind was blowing until we could see it no longer. Then we begin to wait for the phone to ring.

The wait for someone to call and say they had our parachute. If hours went by, my mother might suggest a prayer to St. Anthony. Find her.

Of lost items. Tony. Tony, listen. Listen.

Hurry, hurry. Somethin's missing. You have to believe. If we said the prayer and did believe, the ring would come and someone would say, got your.

I guess it's a parachute here. Landed in my backyard. Almost ran over it with the mower. My father would write down the address and he would get out the street map.

He would pinpoint our destination, and we older kids would set off on our stingery bikes, having been given a reason to trace a route we never would have traced otherwise. So empty and so much the same was every street for miles around. We would leave our cul de sac, named Pine Hill Court, where there was neither pine nor hill, and we would pedal far beyond Springwood Drive and past Happy Valley Way, ending up in some cul de sac we had not known existed. And there would be a man about my father's age with a similarly receding hairline, a knit sports shirt, a man who seemed to be pleased at the serendipitous fun our parachute had brought into a Saturday, a man who safely could be assumed to do blue sky work for a living.

Anywhere we cared to drop a parachute from the sky, there would be someone like him, a house and a family like his and like ours. David Bears memoirs, Blue Sky Dream. We hear a lot about war or hurricanes that hit our shore. We hear a lot about hard times and a good deal more about the crimes that make the front pages of our news.

But all that does is sing the blues about America now. What are the good things in our lives about the men who love their wives, who take their kids when they go fishing, spend their working days just wishing to make things better? A fireman who climbs a tree and sets a little kitten free. Policeman who helps you cross the avenue.

Love the Vocal silence of Mr. John Wayne. Our program was produced today by Nancy Update Myself the Least Speak England Louise Snyder Contributing editors Paul Tufts, Al Jack Hit and Marty Rockman. Thanks today to John Connors.

Our email address radioell.com this American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Funding for our show, it's provided by the Corporation Public Broadcasting, the John D. And Catherine T. And Gartha foundation and the listeners of WBEZ Chicago.

WBEZ manager said by Toy Matteo who's gonna buy you a copy and daddy will run over it with a truck. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life. Bri Public Radio International.