Friday, May 29, 2009

eulogy for lost neighbors (an essay)

When my family moved here, ten years ago, there was a tradition called "circle parties." It would start around six on a Saturday in spring or summer, when kids were finally let free from soccer leagues and music lessons and started trickling into the cul-de-sac. There were probably a dozen of us between six and fourteen at the time. When a quorum formed, the lawn chairs came out. I would help the lady who lives three houses down take them from her backyard and arrange them around the clump of trees in the middle of the circle.

The parents bring dinner out, bar-be-que and pasta salad, and a cooler; the kids play catch and ride bikes until it gets dark. Then everyone gathers in a tight clump on the asphalt. Parents crack open beers and commiserate; the kids catch fireflies and giggle. Around nine or ten everyone goes in and it's over until the next week, but the "circle party" was everything I'd been waiting for when we moved out here from Downtown Silver Spring.

This went on for a few years before everyone got even busier. Kids would pile in to the Suburban wearing Catholic-school uniforms at 8 a.m. and hop out twelve hours later wearing dirty baseball helmets. This was also the time of one-upmanship among the parents, which required them to put in extra hours at the office. One would get a new Mercedes C-Class, the other would reply with the S-Class and so on. I was living in College Park for months at a time, but whenever I came back the circle looked the same: empty.

The family who lives three houses down moved away today. I saw their next-door neighbors outside this afternoon talking softly in Chinese, pointing at the blue recycling bin they'd left at the curb for pick-up tomorrow, the eerily tidy yard free of sports paraphernalia and gardening tools. I remember eating an ice cream cone I'd dropped on their driveway when I was eleven. That was when I joked I was putting the ice cream man's kids through college, because he always knew to stop in front of my house. I'm not even sure if he even comes any more.

They are moving to Brookeville, to a house probably twice the size of the one they had here, which was already the largest on our street. Two of their kids - both of whom spent their entire lives in that house - are in college, with a third to follow next year. They'll have one kid at home and many, many empty rooms. He'll be fifteen soon, I think, and if he was like me at that age, he will be bored out of his mind. But in Brookeville he won't even have the mile-and-a-half walk to Giant and the poky, deliberative Z6 bus that I had.

Not that there aren't kids on our block anymore. The houses turn over slowly, but when they do, it's usually a family just starting out. Whereas my generation - the kids I played with in 1999 - were almost entirely white - the new generation is African, Latino, and Asian. There isn't a single white kid on our street anymore who isn't out of high school. But the circle's starting to get busy again: skateboards and scooters are appearing again, and even on a cool weekday night like last night the sidewalks were filled with people, just walking around.

No one talks to each other yet. We have learned how to say "hi" to each other from passing cars, cell phone in one hand, steering wheel in the other. Today, my mother said she's kind of sad to see our neighbors go. I think the only time they ever crossed the cul-de-sac to see us was to say they were moving to Brookeville. But even if you can live a hundred feet away from someone and never know who they really were, you can still forge these bonds of friendship through the years so that when they leave you feel kind of empty inside.

I hope our new neighbors are as decent as they were.

5 comments:

C. P. Zilliacus said...

Dan, this may be the bestpost you have written on this
blog.

As a 50-year-old single male, I
have seen this happen in my
old community in near U.S. 29
and I-495, and again in my own
townhome near U.S. 29 and
Briggs Chaney Road.

But your observation points
out a bigger shortcoming -
in planning and growth policy
in Montgomery County, and a
de facto policy of
discouraging the construction
of so-called move-up housing
in the county.

As I have suggested before,
maybe less emphasis
on transit patronage and
affordable housing and
more emphasis on
move-up housing would be
in order?

I can enumerate at least10 families that have moved
away from the East County to
other communities, in
particular southern and
eastern Howard County
communities like Fulton,
Scaggsville, Columbia,
Simpsonville, and (recently)
Maple Lawn. And not a oneof them was a client of the
county's Section 8 or other
assisted housing programs.

Dan Reed said...

As I have suggested before,
maybe less emphasis on transit patronage and affordable housing and more emphasis on move-up housing would be in order?
Not so sure about that. You know, we all sit in traffic, and I'm sure congestion's one of the many reasons "middle-class" people choose to leave this area. It's not just the poor who benefit from transit, especially not in this region.

Improving public transit is, I think, one of the biggest issues we face on the east side, and one of the reasons I started writing this blog (see my second post ever). So, as much as I'm going to miss my neighbors, I wouldn't stop advocating for it.

Thanks for the kind words, but you've read this blog long enough to know I'm not buying the rest.

Thomas Hardman said...

One has to wonder about the sort of people who will continue to live in a neighborhood where everyone and everything is becoming a little sketchy and unmaintained, and they spend enough money on a car to have made a very good down payment on a really nice house in a fairly new or well-kept neighborhood.

It's like the folks you see driving around in SE in brand new top-of-the-line Cadillacs. I usually mutter, "damn, fool, why don't you just move to Potomac and drive a Camry there?" But that would make too much sense.

I keep wondering what I'd do if all of a sudden I made big bucks licensing my patent. Would I move to Olney? Probably not I think I'll go blog about my present existential crisis: why do I waste time developing security products that can only benefit people who treat me like filth. Maybe it's so that I could make enough money to move to Olney and be treated like filth by a richer class of jerks.

C. P. Zilliacus said...

Thomas Hardman wrote:

> It's like the folks you
> see driving around in SE in
> brand new top-of-the-line
> Cadillacs. I usually mutter,
> "damn, fool, why don't you
> just move to Potomac and
> drive a Camry there?" But
> that would make too much
> sense.

Maybe. But that new Escalade
or DTS is much more
within the reach of anyone
than a mansion located in Potomac
or Seneca or the Ag Preserve
would be.

And speaking of the Southeast
quadrant of the District
of Columbia, there aresome gorgeous single-family
homes to be found there -
on pretty generously-sized
lots, too.

As an example, check out
this (as long
as you don't report it to
the Smart Growth police).

C. P. Zilliacus said...

Dan Reed wrote:

> Not so sure about that. You
> know, we all sit in traffic,
> and I'm sure congestion's
> one of the many reasons
> "middle-class" people
> choose to leave this
> area.

Can we (or should we) continue
to waste resources stuck
in congestion?

> It's not just the poor
> who benefit from
> transit, especially not
> in this region.

True for those that ride
Metrorail. But we don't now
(nor is it likely that we
ever will) have Metrorail
in Eastern Montgomery County.

> Thanks for the kind words,
> but you've read this blog
> long enough to know I'm
> not buying the rest.

Just one minor comment - I am
not selling anything.