Suburbia

IMPRESSIONS OF SUBURBIA BY ONE WHO HAS NEVER BEEN THERE
OR, ALL I KNOW IS WHAT I SEE IN THE ADS

Suburbia is a modern Utopia,
Of gracious living a cornucopia.
The average family income, I hear,
Is twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
Station wagons adorn valleys and ridges,
And the sports cars travel in swarms, like midges.
Here are gardens where no one weeds or delves,
And, should furnace or freezer act less than dandy,
There's always a quaint old handy-man handy.
The summer weekends are always cool
Round the barbecue grill and the swimming pool,
And in winter the family hovers in glee
O'er the Hi-fi set and the color TV.
With the joys of Nature in such propinquity
There's an absence of juvenile delinquity.
The children (each home has two and I third)
Are the kind that are seen and never heard,
So at nightfall instead of the city's turbulence
You hear a kind of soothing suburbulence
As the young obediently hit the hay
And parents drive off to the P.T.A.
Such is my vision of Suburbia,
Where I'd rather live than in Russia or Serbia.

--Ogden Nash--