our home on Royal Tower Way in Cary, pre sod

Last month marked 3 years since my wife and I returned to Cary after 6 years in the Bay Area. Well, technically we lived in Apex before the California adventure, but close enough.

This, plus the possibility of a cross-post on this outstanding new web site about Cary created by my bandmate, neighbor, and friend Hal Goodtree, inspired me to post some reflections about how things have changed, or not, since we lived here in 1998-2000.

The contrast between life in Cary vs. the Bay Area can be summed up in one word: FAMILY. Life in Cary is all about raising kids. Those years in California showed us how important domestic SPACE was to us. As one of my musician friends remarked while rehearsing among the toys, books, games, puppets, costumes, etc. in the one large room that served as both playroom and music studio, “dude, you need another house just for your toys!”.

When it comes to sheer square-foot-per-dollar value within driving distance of a Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and decent Thai food (the bare necessities), you really can’t beat Cary.

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Even so, it must be said that Cary hasn’t changed all that much in terms of the basic nature of the town. The old saw about C.A.R.Y. = “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees” still rings true. There are very few signs of Southern culture here – or any culture in particular, for that matter. We were sad to see that one of our favorite local pizza restaraunts, Pie Works, had closed. They used to serve rattlesnake and alligator pizza. The suburban sprawl of American homogeneity is threatening to completely engulf surrounding towns like Morrissvile; the old tobacco farms and dilapidated shacks are being torn down and replaced with strip malls with Wal-Marts and Starbucks. Mind you, I happen to like Starbucks, but some of those old farmhouses were really beautiful. They had a charm that came from the fact that somebody built them by hand in order to live in them; they weren’t designed in some corporate office and pieced together by underpaid imported contractors. I used to really enjoy driving past them on my way to RTP.

My daughter, who was born here but only spent the first 8 months of life here, nonetheless seemed to pick up the warm southern accent. Hints of it came through as she spoke her first words – “Mommy, I wanna go to ba-yud.” Sadly, only one of our neighbors actually has that charming accent now. The increased international diversity we’ve noticed here is wonderful – any given morning in our neighborhood you’re likely to see women in Sari’s strolling past old Chinese folks doing Tai Chi, and there are some amazing Indian restaurants here that did not exist in 1998 – but even less remains of the local flavor and history of the place.

Cary is certainly not unique in this respect, but it has been interesting to see the process in this sporadic fashion. As all parents who travel for business know, when you leave your children for a week, or a month – when you return, you notice their changes much more acutely than if you had been with them all along.

Most of us were drawn to Cary in pursuit of a simulacrum; a fantasy of a “village of kings”, where the phrase “a man’s home is his castle” takes literal form. Cary has delivered on that promise; but in doing so, it has paid a price, and so have we. Like most American suburbs built up too quickly around the dying cores of small towns, economies of scale tend to overwhelm the local culture. An important challenge for Cary will be to retain the last vestiges of local flavor while providing modern, mobile families with the affordable “creature comforts” that brought us here in the first place, and keep bringing us back.