The Communities We Build

It’s a summer evening, well after 9 o’clock. The dusk is giving way to darkness as I walk my neighborhood. The air is a warm velvety embrace; the melodious calling of the owls is winding down.  These birds are vocal throughout the dusk, looking for what? Lady owls to hook up with? By dark, they are silent. Perhaps they have succeeded in finding companionship. Perhaps they have given up, and are heading out into the night for another kind of hunting. 

As I walk, I examine the houses.  Interior lights are starting to wink on, revealing people eating, washing dishes, watching TV. I peek like a voyeur, speculating about these lives.  It occurs to me: I no longer know these people. When did that happen?  

We bought our house because of the neighborhood.  The year was 1991, the market was a little soft and the house itself---a run-down rancher---needed a lot of work.  It’s why we could afford it.  But oh, the neighborhood.  One of the first settled on the Peninsula, Redwood City was a port town during the Gold Rush. The stagecoach ran over the mountains to the coast, carrying people and mail and cash and whiskey.  Logs were dragged out of the mountains, both directions, to the ocean and the Bay.  By 1869, it was the County seat, about the only habitation between San Francisco and Palo Alto. 

Our neighborhood was laid out for horse traffic. Its wide windy streets echo the curves of Cordilleras Creek, where wealthy San Franciscans built summer cottages to get out of the City’s fog. Unlike the Eichlers and other post-war, pop-up neighborhoods, Edgewood Park was settled over the course of a hundred years or so.  The houses are diverse and unique, nestled among tall redwoods and mature oaks. It was, and is, a beautiful place.

Its human community was cool, too.  People moved in, and they didn’t move out.  Kids ran in packs across the lawns. On hot summer days, they’d wait for the ice cream truck, or walk up to the hospital, which oddly, had a frozen yogurt bar in the basement.  Once we put in the pool, our back yard was the place to congregate—the kids for a swim and the parents for a cocktail.  This is the way I wanted it.  Having a free range, latch key

childhood myself, I wanted something different for my kids. 

In those days, when I walked my streets, I could tell you about every family.  I would have shown up with a pie when they moved in.  I knew about the people on my street, and the next, and the next. I could tell you about their kids, their careers, their struggles, their stories.

This night of the owls, I wonder: When did I lose that? 

There are any number of reasons.  Seasons change. Kids grow up. You take a big job that has you away from your house most of the time.  Someone dies, and you no longer have the heart; you just can’t do it.  So you retreat into a hard little bud, tightly furled, against all the ways the world can hurt you. And then, one night you realize: I no longer have a sense of place about my neighborhood.  Is that really what I want?

We humans often seem to yearn for the places we’re not.  I had a college roommate from the East coast who fell in love with California, but also pined fiercely for the East.  She moved back and forth, living in one place then the other, never feeling fully at home.  I have a little of this going on with Santa Fe.  I miss the New Mexico night skies, the sunsets, the high desert plateaus.  But when I was there, I missed here—the 40-year friendships, the down-to-my-bones familiarity of this landscape.

Pondering this, I take a daytime walk.  I determine to have no route; no timetable, and just take whatever comes.  Here’s what came.

I encounter Barb, a lovely woman with whom I was close when our kids were little. Barb has a new tattoo.  It matches her daughter Megan’s and is the sign language symbol for “I love you.”  Megan was a friend of Carson’s. They entered kindergarten together and we carpooled and socialized frequently in those years.  Megan suffered an injury to her hearing early in life, and these mother-daughter tattoos mark the long road she has had in achieving her calling.  Megan is now an audiologist at Stanford. Barb’s eyes shine with pride as she explains all this.  I have tears in my own eyes—for the exquisite sweetness of story; for all the things that Carson will never achieve.  That is wonderful, I tell her.  Give my congratulations to Megan.  

Next up on this same walk, I meet Katherine---smart, funny, caring Katherine. She and Jim moved into the neighborhood when our kids were nearly grown, and we became a friendly middle-aged foursome—swapping backyard dinners and catching up every few months.  Katherine also has a new thing to report. A stent---a lot less fun than a tattoo. It happened after a scary onset of respiratory symptoms and a stupid fight with an insurance company that dropped the ball. I am so sorry you had to go through this, I tell her.  What can I do? Nothing, she assures me.  All is well now, and she is back to vigorous walking.  I tell her how glad I am for her outcome, and we make plans for another dinner soon.

A few minutes later, I run into Arlene, the 80-something dynamo who lives across the street.  “Did you hear?” she asks and tells me of another neighbor who has been diagnosed with a serious illness.  This neighbor has always seemed intensely private.  Arlene tells me he has no family nearby.

“What does he need?” I ask. We discuss how we’ll help, and it turns out that lots of other neighbors are leaning in. One is a doctor; great at navigating that system. Another is particularly skilled at conquering the paperwork. Another mows the lawn. The kids draw pictures and hang up a get-well banner. I provide support born of my experience as a medical writer and a peer counselor. We all deliver home-cooked food.  Arlene is our quarterback. We are planning a potluck on his driveway next week.

Now there is a whole team of neighbors helping one of our own through a rough passage. He laments that he "cannot reciprocate," but I tell him he already has. How? he wants to know. “None of us knew each other all that well before," I say.  "You brought us together. You gave us a gift by letting us help.”

Maybe it’s a human thing, always looking for that situation that might be better; that banquet that could be tastier. But shouldn't we sample from the table that's already set? What if we just doubled down on wherever we were? Built the biggest, baddest, best communities out of whatever was right in front of us? Lollie, our indefatigable Irish tour guide from last summer, had a phrase for this, attributed to her own wise Irish mother: Graze where you are tethered. 

It’s another night, cooler this time, and I am walking again. I think of Barb, and Katherine, and Arlene, and all the rest of them. I watch the lights wink on. I consider how it might be time to re-learn the lives around me. To invest again in my own sense of place. To unfurl the tight little bud, just a bit.

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