good fences.

When I was growing up, I knew all of our neighbors, and we all knew each others' business.  I don't want this to sound all halcyon-days rural-utopia; I grew up deep in the heart of suburbia, and I think that the local culture on our street was an exception rather than the rule, even for my hometown.  But we did know all the neighbors.  (My mother still does, and still keeps that network active.  When I finished my doctorate, I got congratulations cards from families up and down the block back home, including at least a few people who I don't think I've talked to since my last trick-or-treating run in eighth grade.  My mother has a real gift for keeping people in touch with each other--it's one of the things I admire most about her.)

That connectedness of the old neighborhood hasn't really carried through anywhere else I've lived, though.  In the last seven or eight years, in particular, it seems that I only get to know anything about my neighbors when some kind of calamity strikes our neighborhood.  Back in my old apartment in a slightly dodgy part of Oakland, the little garage unit behind my building caught on fire, and that brought out the whole block.  One of the women from the building next door came running over, banging on our doors and windows, and people up and down the street were standing on the sidewalk, calling the fire department from cordless or cell phones.  Three strangers helped us evacuate the collection of parrots from the upstairs apartment, and everyone had suggestions for how to get the smoke smell out when we were finally allowed back into the building.  (The fire never spread from the garage to the main building, thankfully.  The people in the upstairs apartment had been using the garage to store their SCA equipment, and they lost several thousand dollars' worth of costuming and pavillion tents, but there were no injuries, either human or parrot.) 

A year or two after the fire, not long before I left that apartment, one of the women who lived in my building was held up at gunpoint on our front steps.  Three in the morning, I was woken up by someone screaming, the loud thumping of a door being pushed shut, some shouting.  It was over before I was fully awake, but when the police came, they asked me to wait a while and give them a statement.  I sat out on the stoop for over an hour, talking with another neighbor who'd heard a similar jumble of noise and was also waiting to give a statement.  By the end of that hour, I knew more about his life than I knew about most of my friends from graduate school--something about the quiet middle of the night running up against the jangled nerve-ends made it easy to talk.  That was nearly five years ago, and I'm not sure I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street tomorrow, but I remember that night, bare feet on the concrete steps and the smoke from the cigarettes he lit with slightly shaking hands. 

There's nothing that profound that happened today, just the run-of-the-mill hassle of my car being broken into.  Again.  The passenger-side window was smashed to bits, small crackled rafts of safety-glass all over the seats.  We didn't notice until late afternoon, when Matt was on his way out to work, but god, it feels like I should have the auto body shop on speed-dial by now.  (And it's a holiday weekend--I won't even be able to get in touch with them until Monday, which is New Year's Eve, so who knows when I'll be able to get a new window?)  Nothing was stolen--there was nothing in the car but books, honestly, and the thieves/vandals apparently weren't interested in Thomas Pynchon and David Liss--but Matt can't take it to work like this, leaving it window-less in the parking lot at his store, and how can I go buy groceries tomorrow when everything is covered in glass and open to the rain? 

By the time I was done collecting case numbers and badge numbers and claim numbers, I was too irritated to do anything else, but later in the evening I finally wandered out to see about rescuing the books from the wreckage and taping some plastic to the window.  While I was out there, one of the neighbors from my building came out to talk.  It's the guy in the parking space next to ours, and our interactions so far have been limited to waving and smiling when we cross paths while parking.  Tonight we had a nice little chat about the cars and the neighborhood and the crime--he's been hit much worse than us, and much more often.  He does construction work of some kind, and has a locked tool-case in the back of his pickup truck.  A few months ago, he says, someone came in the middle of the night and sawed through the titanium lock.  That's not some crazy drugged-up teenager, that's premeditation, that requires something like a battery-operated sawzall.  They took five, six hundred dollars' worth of tools, including a crowbar that they used to pry open a storage unit in the parking area and steal some more stuff.  He had suggestions for us, and some ideas about why this keeps happening, but mostly it was just a shared venting of frustration, which was nice. 

I'd still much rather that the stupid car hadn't been attacked again, of course.  But if I have to look for a bright side, it was nice to get a chance to talk to my neighbor.

Comments

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

So really it's teetering-on-the-verge-of-collapse fences that make good neighbors...

[Jackie M.]

I can't help but wonder if confessing one's entire life story to a near-complete stranger at three in the morning isn't somehow made easier by the unconscious awareness that you will be unlikely to recognize one another several years later...