Out of Pocket

🗓 posted Feb 04, 2026 by Josh Erb
🔢 1432 words
🏷
a dispatch from: Arlington Heights, Illinois

Rarely are you able to see your home country with the eyes of a stranger. I do think, though, that this is one of the gifts that comes with living abroad for an extended period of time. Any time you return "home" it affords you the chance to see your old way of life with fresh eyes.

We went back to the Chicago suburbs for a few weeks this January. On our first full day back in the Midwest the temperature was -20°F without windchill. A nice "warm" welcome back to the northern climes we've been away from for so long. The local weather report informed us that the last time the temperature had dropped this low was in 2014. At the time, I had been living on the south side of Chicago completing my graduate degree. Despite the fact that I could feel the mucus membrane in my nose turning to ice if I was outside for more than three minutes, it induced a warm nostalgia I had not been expecting.


A Quick Word about the Suburbs

Let me be clear, though: I hold no love in my heart for the suburbs as a geo-morphological phenomenon. My wife spent a good chunk of her childhood here and so driving around triggers fond memories. I grew up much farther from the city and its sprawl, and I've spent my adult life living in Chicago and DC (mostly DC). To my mind, the American suburbs represent the apotheosis of consumption at the expense of all other culture. There are bright spots like thriving community libraries and thrift stores[1], don't get me wrong. But these always feel more like exceptions than rules.

Funny Feelings

There were a few striking things about coming back to the U.S.A. after living in Mumbai for a little more than 1.5 years.

We left Mumbai at the height of pollution season. Except for a few snowy days, our time in Illinois has been marked by clear blue skies and crisp fresh air. When you live under extreme air pollution conditions, you find your sense of normalcy shifting dramatically. Back in Mumbai, my threshold for whether or not I'll go outside was up to checking to see if the AQI was below 180. But over these few weeks in suburbia, I haven't seen it go higher than 70. Despite the extreme cold, it's been pleasant to be outside and breathe clean air.

When the temperature has risen a bit and the wind chill isn't so bad, I've been able to take walks around the neighborhood. In the mornings, before my son is up, I've walked around residential sidewalks without hearing a single car horn or construction site. I didn't realize how unfamiliar I had become with the possibility of silence.

That being said, there are inevitably some things that I had begun to take for granted during our time in India. For one, my sense of what a shopping mall should be has shifted. In India, they are still very much a class marker and meant primarily for shopping for brand name items. Our primary use for them is having a place to walk around during pollution season or the heavy rains of monsoon. During our return we used the suburban shopping malls for a similar reason: we needed somewhere to walk without the risk of frost bite.

But in the U.S. I am more sensitive to the shifts of mall culture. The primacy of experiences and social media boosted trends are unmissable. Large sections dedicated to pay-to-play kids' adventure lands. Escape rooms. It isn't hard to find 1,000 ft2 of retail space dedicated to Labubus™️ and various other trendy dolls I'm not young enough to recognize.[2]

Culturally, one of the biggest differences my wife and I noticed immediately is just how different strangers' interactions with our son are. This is maybe one of the best things about India compared to most other places I have lived: children are generally viewed as a blessing and a communal responsibility. If your toddler is acting out on a long plane ride, rather than shooting dirty glances at you or muttering about it, Indian passengers will generally try to help you distract or soother your child. In a similar vein, if your outgoing child insists on saying "hello" to people, they won't ignore them or brush them off. They'll probably start up a conversation lasts longer than you're comfortable with as an American. Our flight back to Chicago had a layover in Amsterdam and the shift was palpable the moment after we disembarked from our flight out of Mumbai.

The Utopian Enclaves of Suburbia

I wrote the earlier section ranting against the American suburbs and I feel obligated to highlight the positive things as well.

I would be remiss not to mention that suburban libraries generally kick ass. Not in terms of their catalog, necessarily,[3] but in terms of their communal space and services. One of the first things we did after we recovered from jet lag was go to the neighborhood library and renew our library cards. As a result we had a steady rotation of picture books for our toddler and a place to hang out when we felt cooped up. Other countries have libraries, but these are usually in the context of academe and not the bedrock of community. I do think that the community library is one of America's finest accomplishments.

Along the same lines, I have a pet theory that the book section in thrift stores gives the most accurate snapshot of the intellectual life of a community. During our time in the northwest suburbs, I visited 4 different thrift stores. In some of the thrift stores, the book selection has dwindled down to a few meager shelves of self-help books and religious best sellers. In the best ones there were large sections of pulp westerns, forgotten Pulitzer prize winners, and obscure non-fiction. I promised my wife I wouldn't buy books while we were here, since space and weight are at a premium in our checked luggage, but I spent $6 and have 5 new interesting, out of fashion books.

Pockets of Violence

Of course, there are several rather large elephants in this post's room. The dark clouds of the political situation in the U.S. and the increased normalcy of political violence. Both of these were very much in the back of our minds as we stepped into our home country. Despite traveling on our diplomatic passports, there was a tension in the air at the border check. As we waited at the carousel for our bags, I counted up the different groupings of CBP, ICE, and other agencies I saw milling around. I wondered if these had been present on previous trips and I simply hadn't noticed.

Once we were deeper into the suburbs, though, I was struck by the fact that all of the news still remained an arm's length away. The only thing that had changed was our proximity to it in both time and space. When news broke about Alex Pretti, we were sitting in a friend's dining room in Chicago. Our friends talked to us about the roving gangs of ICE agents that had descended on their neighborhood a few months earlier. The history of the country is unfolding in pockets near and far. We didn't encounter anything directly, only encountered its residue.

The truth is, I feel oddly absent from the fight against my country's democratic backsliding despite being all tangled up in federal institutions. I'm on the other side of the world and nominally prohibited from engaging in the grassroots organizing necessary to stem the tides.

I find myself unsure of the country that we'll return home to in October. I'm sure the ground will have shifted in a million imperceptible ways. The terrain will be unfamiliar to me.

  1. More thoughts on this further down the page.

  2. It's entirely possible this particular set of funny feelings is due to my age rather than any cultural dislocation. There's a longer blog post to be written about aging out of the dominant culture, I'm sure.

  3. Though I am forced to admit that I have niche literary tastes, so this is perhaps a comment that does not reflect the experience of the broader community.

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