Streets to Dwell In
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It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
I trust that most of you remember Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, perhaps as well as I do. Mr. Rogers knew his neighbors—people who dropped by his home all the time to share some useful tidbit of information. Mr. Rogers lived in a community, a group of people bound together by location, common care and concern. And yes, I realize it was a TV land of make-believe.
Nonetheless, it inspires me to ask: how many people who live in your immediate vicinity do you know on a first-name basis? More than ten? More than five? More than two? Modern life is hardly conducive to the notion of neighborhoods. Many of us work long hours, and can barely find time to hang out with our families, let alone the people who live down the street or around the bend. Many of us drive from our garages to our destinations and home again, all but hermetically sealed from the people around us.
Most of us have been taught, one way or another, that the family unit, whatever it may be, should be sufficient unto itself. We’ve learned about our property rights and we’ve held fiercely to our privacy. But along the way we seem to have lost something else.
Technically speaking, a neighbor is someone who lives near you. But what we tend to forget is that just the fact of living close to another means that we are mutually dependent. A neighborhood is an ecological niche every bit as much as a pine forest or saltwater marsh. When we think about the ruin of modern cities, what comes to mind is likely to be urban blight—dusty, trash-filled lots and battered store-fronts. But there is many a tidy suburb that is sterilized of human interaction, devoid of the interchange that makes any ecology healthy.
All vital ecology is built on a complex, interrelated web of beings; human ecologies are no exception. When Gary down the street asked me to watch his baby for an hour while he dealt with an emergency, what Gary needed was not to hire the highest quality daycare service. He needed a neighbor. When we needed a 30-foot ladder to paint our upstairs windows, Diane and Alan kindly lent us theirs—for the better part of two summers. We didn’t need to spend $400 on a ladder we only wanted for one, admittedly lengthy, task. We needed folks within ladder-carrying distance, neighbors, who were willing to share.
Wendell Berry comments on this dubious evolution: “We have given up understanding…that we and our country create one another…. As we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here…are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone.”
That connection is easier to see when, like Berry, you live in a rural area. Things, however, are somewhat different in the city. When your neighbors crowd in on every side it’s tempting to feel that “good fences make good neighbors,” that what makes life possible are all of the things that draw our boundaries and give us some personal space. We tend to define good neighbors not as people we depend on, and who depend on us, but as those who are invisible. Good neighbors don’t play loud music, good neighbors don’t let their dogs leave messes on our front grass, good neighbors don’t practice piano at 1:00 in the morning, etc.
Certainly there are “good fences”—sensible limitations that allow us to live in close proximity without driving one another bats. Certainly my life was improved when we repaired the hole in our back fence, through which my dog and the neighbor’s dog were carrying on a bark-off that had escalated to a canine version of “American Idol.” But sometimes I even wonder about our fences.
I came out the door one day to find that our neighbor, Dick, had built a new fence—a four-foot-high vision of white plastic latticework separating the granite chips of his front yard from the concrete side walkway of ours. It was an ugly fence, to be sure, but more than that, it stuck out like a cow in the middle of a golf course. What, we wondered, was the point? Why fence off his nothing much from our nothing in particular? What was so egregious that it needed to be walled off from view?
The only conceivable answer was, of course, us. For some reason we had been consigned to whatever circle of hell is ringed by tacky plastic fencing. By now we were starting to get mad. What was his problem, anyway? Did he hate us because of our rainbow flag? Without a word being exchanged, hostilities escalated. Kelsey and I started trotting out all of Dick’s prior bad acts, like the way he parked his RV practically in our driveway for days at a time, grooming it before and after weekend outings.
In a matter of hours we went from cordial, if less than enthusiastic, neighbors to something resembling North and South Korea. It turned out, when we interrogated Bob, our neighbor on the other side, that Dick had built the fence because he was “tired of looking at our trash cans.” The trash cans, that is, that my wife Kelsey pushed up to the side of the house when she left for work on Friday, trash day. There they would sit for—horrors!—eight hours or so, until she put them behind our fence when she came home.
So Kelsey began to move the trash cans back behind the fence every Friday morning. We still said hi to Dick when we saw him, but the chill was noticeable, at least to us. “Why didn’t he just ask us to move the cans?” we asked each other. But we didn’t ask Dick.
Dick was our neighbor, in the sense that we lived next door to one another, but the fence escapade—both his lack of communication and ours—blunted our sense of neighborliness, our understanding of what it means to have connecting lives. I wish I could claim that we worked our way around to a deeper sense of neighborliness, but I’m afraid we never did.
Martin Luther King said that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” It’s when we manage to invest in that network of mutuality, to bind the threads more tightly, to weave in a few new colors, that we discover what it really means to be neighbors. Sometimes that weaving is deceptively simple. One summer, when we lived in Chicago, we decided to have a block party—the first that anyone on the block could remember. Betsy from downstairs made up a flier and Kelsey got permission from the city to close off the street, and there we were.
Now, perhaps I should explain a little bit about where we lived. Chicago is divided up into neighborhoods, and you can feel like you’ve literally gone from one country to another in the course of walking a city block. We lived in Albany Park, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, but mere houses to the east of us was Ravenswood Manor, which is overwhelmingly white and well-to-do. Not surprisingly, mostly white folks lived on our end of the block, and mostly Latino and Black folks lived on the western end. In some odd articulation of the hierarchy of race in this country, Asian folks lived in the middle.
Well, on the day of the party, by the time I came home from officiating at a wedding, the gathering was well under way. Folks from our end of the block had barbeques out, and some of the kids were starting to play together. It was charming, but it wasn’t really a block party. It was more like people watching a parade from in front of their houses, only without the parade. But as time wore on, the most amazing things started to happen.
About 5:00, close to when the party was scheduled to end, the Vietnamese folks who lived in the houses around the center of the block started barbequing. Mr. Li, who’s pretty much a wild and crazy guy even before he starts drinking, began waving and calling people over to share their food. And so those of us who had been munching on bratwurst and watermelon at the east end of the block made our way over to sample their noodles and ribs. Some of the folks who were hosting us in the middle of the block spoke hardly any English, but food is a pretty universal language, and we were smiling, and learning names and who lived where, and Saul put on some Salsa music and it was beginning to feel like a real party.
Two adults with a rope became a limbo bar, and the kids who weren’t busy riding their bikes through sprinklers in the middle of the street started playing limbo together. By this point the Mexican and Guatemalan-American folks at the end of the block had fired up their barbeque, and when they saw that the party was still lingering in front of Mr. Li’s house, Raúl came up with a plate of tacos, saying: “If you’re not going to come down to share our food, we’ll bring it to you.”
So everyone ended up down at the western end of the block, eating tacos—made, rather surprisingly, with hotdogs—and chatting in mostly, but far from exclusively, English. By the time that the stars and the tequila came out Mr. Li was hugging Tony and declaring brotherhood and everyone was agreeing that next year we’d just start out with all the tables in the middle of the block.
Somehow in the course of that afternoon we made the journey to a larger home. I’m not sure whether it happened for me when I sampled Bin’s noodle dish or when I dared to try my lamentably bad Spanish with Serena, or when I watched Eddie, the red-headed ten-year-old trouble maker, proudly write his name in chalk on the sidewalk in front of our house. Somehow, in the course of eating and talking and daring to step a little bit outside of what we each knew, we became neighbors, real neighbors, people bound to one another not because we were alike, or even because we were comfortable together, but rather because we shared a common place.
There are other ways, easier ways, for people to be bound together. On the internet you can join up with people who share your enthusiasm for quilting or pinochle or Bernese Mountain Dogs. In the cyber world you can select the people who interest you, who share your tastes, and let the filters take care of the rest. But in the real world we are plagued with people whose dogs bark and whose landscaping is ugly, people who listen to music we don’t like and speak languages we don’t understand. And it’s only when we take the time to be with those people, to need them and to help them and to play with them, that we live in the real world at all.
We’re all familiar with the great lament about our isolated society. But what we tend to forget is that just as we so often choose to be isolated, so can we choose to be connected. You can put your kids in the wagon and walk to the store, waving and stopping to talk with people as you go. You can take the folks next door a pie at Christmas. You can offer to feed the neighbor’s cat while they’re away. You can go across the street and ask for a cup of sugar. You can rake leaves or shovel snow for more than your own patch of ground. You can have a block party, and turn your street, if only for a day, into a meeting place, a playground, a place for people to connect.
We choose to build fences, and we can also choose to tear down walls, to make a place for a sense of belonging to flourish, even in a society that expects us to stay apart. You can, if you so choose, fulfill the vision of the prophet Isaiah (58:12), who proclaimed that “you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.”
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