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.
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.