But I chose to answer your post at length because I remember distinctly how earthshaking my own move was(around age 12) from the vital ethnic Cuban urban working class neighborhoods of Ybor City, Tampa, to lily-white suburban redneck Brandon, about 15 miles out of town. There were some advantages at first, I had access to open country and even some wilderness, and the skies were dark enough for astronomy. But I went overnight from a street-wise city urchin to an out-of-place suburban pre-teen. In Brandon, you couldn't take the bus and get around, and there was no Boy's Club or Municipal Pool, or sandlot baseball, or going downtown to a movie or to catch the wrestling matches at the TV studio. You were in the boonies, and if you didn't have a car you were a social outcast.

Also, in town, I had extended family and friends and neighbors of my parents who were always available for a chat or a treat. It seemed everybody knew me, (and ratted me out to my mom if I got into mischief). The Cuban ghetto had a lot more in common with Mayberry RFD than the sparse, scattered suburbs west of town.

Out in the country it was all weird Anglo people with impenetrable accents and mystifying customs. Unlike the city, I had no friends my own age except at school, and school was 7 miles away by bus (I had always walked to school before, and my classmates were my neighbors). I now only had one school chum living near me (two miles walk away!).

When I was a kid we had kid toys, we had tops, stickball, yo-yos, kites, marbles, bikes to get around with. In the country, the hormones kicked in and only girls mattered any more, and if you didn't have a car you just had no access to girls, or any hope of ever having access.

There were some advanatages, I could rent a rowboat at Giant's Camp and go fishing in the Alafia River. I could catch frogs and snakes in the canals that drained my neighborhood, and I could hunt fossils at the phosphate pits. But these were mostly solitary pursuits. In school, only football and cars seemed to matter, and I had no access to the latter and rapidly came to hate the former.

Suburbia sucked, big time. And I never had the heart to tell my mother. I knew perfectly well she had sacrificed so much to allow me to grow up in that environment, I couldn't just tell her I had been happier at the Ponce de Leon Projects in Ybor City.