Are you meant to live in a smaller city? Maybe Omaha instead of LA?

Even before carrying urban packs on our backs became the thing, we toted our insides around with us.

PHOENIX — Touring some cities in Europe, I remember a minor shock I had below ground in Paris’ Metro system once decades ago, awaiting a subway train at the platform. On an opposite wall was a large color poster of towering red spires in Arizona’s Monument Valley.

I had come about 5,500 miles from Phoenix, across most of the continental U.S. and Atlantic Ocean to Paris, in order to see a big picture of Arizona? It wasn’t a travel advertisement. It may have an illustration to promote color televisions back then.

The poster presented to Parisians something rather evocative for them, an iconic setting for Western movies far removed from them in time and distance. But to me it just meant some scenery, wonderful though it was, in the northeast of my home state.

By the same token, a couple of blocks from my home in Phoenix in some of the latter part of the 20th century was a Parisian cafe. Not a real one imported brick by brick from France, just a restaurant built to give that impression, with a suitable tasty menu. It was a Phoenix restaurant not decked out like a trading post on the reservation amid the towering red spires of Monument Valley, Ariz., but a cafe meant to evoke the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower. It was croque monsieur on the menu, not frybread or hot dogs.

The Phoenix cafe even had allowed people to sit at its tables for hours and read books while sipping their coffee or tea, as long as newly arrived customers didn’t need the tables. I also ate at another branch of the same “French” restaurant in southern California, when I worked there in Orange County.

Ahh, southern California. For some decades — before the Democratic Party dictatorship in Sacramento began driving the Golden State into the mire — SoCal was supposed to be a lot of people’s dreamland. But they moved there and what did some of them do? Eat at a “French” restaurant a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean. Or maybe go to a “Chinese” theater — Grauman’s — in world-famed movie capital Hollywood, Caley-for-nigh-yay. Oh, Grauman is a Chinese name? No, but that was the last name of the showman who headed the partnership that built the “Chinese” theater, Sid Grauman.

So if Grauman wasn’t born in China, then where? Indianapolis, says Wikipedia. And where did he learn of the importance of showmanship? The Yukon Gold Rush, says Wikipedia.

Way before an elite decided to impose its political globalism on everyone, it seems that elements of around-the-world were doing pretty well on their own in the U.S. Without being rammed down our throats.

We humans seem to like to dream more of beyond the horizon than be perfectly comfortable with what we have, regardless of who or what or where we are. (Anyway, to be “perfectly” comfortable might mean stagnation.)

By the way, come to think of it, what kind of restaurant did I discover online in Moscow (in Russia, not in Moscow, Idaho)? Well, one I found was decorated not as if it celebrated the great Russian authors of the 19th century — but as if it were amid palm trees in 21st century southern California.

SoCal? Oh, that place with the French restaurant — actually, many of them — and Chinese theater? The same. As for Sid Grauman’s Indianapolis birthplace, I recall our parents occasionally taking my preteen sister and me to an Indianapolis French restaurant, Rene’s, there on West Washington Street. (By the way, Indianapolis means “Indian City.” Hmm, like in Monument Valley, Ariz., as seen in the poster at the Paris, France, Metro station?) And Dad sometimes taking Mom and us to an Italian restaurant in downtown Indy. And that was before one of the early local pizza kitchens with its big oven and balls of dough opened on West Washington Street. And it was a couple of decades before my sister married an Italian-heritage man. In southern California. In a Spanish mission-style church. Down near Mexico.

Wherever you go, however, you’re still carrying you. I recall reading a column on the New York Times’ opinion page a half-century ago saying that even if you move far away, you’re the same person staring at the new bedroom wall as before — unless a change comes from within you. Of course, some settings for life may be more beneficial than others, but being in Rome or Paris in and of itself doesn’t make you a different person. Just a few weeks ago — in other words, a half-century after the Times column — I read a different article by a woman making the same point, that living in Europe didn’t change the fact that she had to hold a job and do the laundry, shop, and other tasks of life.

I recall a man once telling me, decades ago, that he’d felt like a loser, but now that he was engaged to be married, he felt like the winner. Sadly, within about a year of the marriage he soon would be divorced. His inferior-feeling interior life had remained the same and apparently soon overpowered the externals.

I say all this by way of preface to the topic in my headline about perhaps living in a smaller city. The size of a city itself may not be the most important among life’s concerns — although even before the flight from urban cores due to the pandemic, many people preferred to live out in a suburb even if having to commute for an hour to work in dense downtown.

I remember working in Phoenix daily journalism with a former resident of New York City who felt he absolutely had to get out of there — and he did — because of what he viewed as its depressing concrete canyons. I’ve been to New York a few times. I could see what he meant when I, on the sidewalk, looked down a Manhattan street and saw one high-rise or skyscraper literally right after another, as if I were at the bottom of a canyon constructed of concrete.

On the other hand, if megalopolitan development was mostly hated, would so much of it have risen up? Oh, perhaps a few such urban centers, but as many as we have? Well, they do have their attractions such as opportunity and variety. And even being able to lose oneself amid the scurrying masses. The lure was summarized in these few words: Bright lights, big city. Or — looky, Paris is staring us in the face again — as the title of a 1919 song asked, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Pa-ree?” Wikipedia explains: “The lyrics highlight concern that soldiers would not want to return to their family farms after experiencing the European city life and culture of Paris during World War I.”

I’ve lived the large majority of my life in Phoenix. During my time, it went from less than a half-million population within the city limits to around 1.65 million today, the fifth-largest city in the U.S. It’s a spread-out city, more than 500 square miles. The metropolitan population including Phoenix’s large suburbs in 2023 is around 4.71 million. Total square miles, more than 1,000.

I just took this for granted and generally stayed in my own part of the metro area. But if I had to run an errand, I might easily have to drive a 50-mile round trip, and that wasn’t from one far edge of the metro to the other far edge, but just from one part of Phoenix to one of its suburbs and back. Have things just gotten too big for me?

I noted in my August 26, 2023, Substack post (“Getting back in the skies again, above the evil and hypocrisy”) that I was visiting Omaha for the second time. Its metropolitan area is less than one million people. It’s a good-sized city, a modern metro area, but not the perhaps daunting expanse of Phoenix. I liked being in Omaha last week. I’m not trying to be Mr. Zoning Czar, but would it work out better for individuals and being able to breathe freely if we had more metro areas scattered around the nation of one million people, and fewer of five million or more? An Omaha relative in a single-family home, who grew up in a southern California single-family home, told me that her family in eastern Nebraska knows the names of the various neighbors, which hadn’t been true back in SoCal.

(On the other hand, decades ago when I had lived in Orange County, Calif., considered to be part of the Los Angeles metro area, I was amid around 10 million people. But I liked the fact that you could stick to a suburb or three and have a local feel. An entire year could go by and I never drove up to LA itself or felt any need to, or to be where buildings exceeded maybe 10 stories.

(Oh, how we Orange Countians hated to hear someone in another part of the nation say that Disneyland was in Los Angeles. No no no, we said. It’s in Orange County! Of course, that was back before Disneyland took on serious political implications. And also back when a family of four or five could enjoy the day at that park without having to spend hundreds of dollars — or even more.)

I’ve lived most of my life west of the Rockies — Arizona and California — but visiting Omaha has left me wondering about its Great Plains lifestyle. Snow and tornadoes are question marks, but having rivers instead of the desert’s concrete-lined canals smacks of nature, sort of like when I as a kid searched for crawdads in a small, rural Indianapolis woodsy creek.

Back in the 1960s, smaller Phoenix wanted attention and acknowledgment that we were a worthwhile city. How great it was, we thought, when Time magazine ran a major feature on Phoenix. It helped, of course, that Time’s publisher, the wealthy magazine magnate Henry R. Luce, had a winter home here.

Today I’d say that if Omaha has any similar desire for greater recognition, because it’s not yet like Chicago or Kansas City, don’t worry about it. You look like you’re doing fine to me.