Saturday, May 15, 2010

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

I don't feel as if I'm used to living in a house yet.  One of the things I've noticed about being a homeowner is how exposed it makes you feel.  Or, I suppose I should say, how exposed it makes me feel, which I think has at least something to do with my status as a not-yet-licensed driver.  Most people who live in a place like this, whenever they leave their houses, get into their cars and drive away.  I do not do that, and so, as I go out onto the stoop, lock the front door behind me, shoulder my capacious purse (a holdover from my life in New York, where, not having cars in which to stash all the day's gear, the citizenry resorts to carrying it around with them), and get hold of my son, a stroller, a Bronx-style folding stand-up shopping cart, or some combination thereof, I feel awkwardly conspicuous.  My feeling of conspicuousness comes not only from my accouterments, but also from my very presence, standing there on the front porch, walking down the front walk, and taking to the sidewalk in order to go where I need to.  Very few people go out their front doors (after all, their garages are in the back), and very few people use the neighborhood sidewalks as a path leading to a destination that must be gotten to.  Some people use them for recreation:  in the course of the day, I generally see a few dog-walkers, sometimes a mother with a baby in a stroller (never a preschooler, another New York custom), a jogger or two, and one young man with Down's Syndrome who, like me, walks the neighborhood with a purposeful stride in all weathers. 

I'm also not at all used to living in a neighborhood of homeowners.  In order to cut down on the feeling of being exposed, I was careful to hang a clothesline in the backyard in a spot that would be as inconspicuous as possible from the street or the surrounding houses.  The backyard is quite shady, while the front yard gets the sun, so I know I will have to take a deep breath and allow myself to be seen gardening there, visible to the neighbors and to people in passing cars.  In New York, you can make yourself socially invisible by the unspoken code of avoiding eye contact with other pedestrians and even with your neighbors, who generally understand, but in a place like this, where so few people are out walking, it would seem rude to try to avoid conversations with neighbors and passersby.  At times, I've tried to go out of my way to avoid talking to people.  Last week, however, I realized I was being a little ridiculous when, on my way home from somewhere, I could see my across-the-street neighbor (who, incidentally, sold us our homeowners' insurance) doing yard work from half a block away.  In order to avoid having to talk to him, I made a turn instead of keeping straight, walked to the next block, and tried to determine whether there was some secret passageway into my backyard through someone else's.  When it was clear that I would have to hack my way through a sheer wall of hedges, I gave up, and walked back to my own street.  My neighbor came across the street to talk to me, and we actually had quite a pleasant chat.

14 comments:

ex--newyorker said...

I've never commented here before, but you're on my Google Reader. I just had to say, I am from Brooklyn, living in the suburbs of another metropolitan area, and I so understand your last paragraph. I've gotten "better" about it, but there are still times when there's a lot going on internally and I revert at least partially to those old ways.

(I had actually begun to wonder whether I just have Asperger's or something, and it's not as much about being from New York like I'd always thought. But your post makes me think otherwise.)

Pentimento said...

Welcome, Ex-NewYorker. Hmmm, Asperger's vs. New York conditioning . . . I don't know. A good friend of mine with Asperger's always asserted that I had it too, so maybe you're on to something.

Rodak said...

Beautifully written. I, too, still carry a bag around, having first gotten used to it long decades ago, in Brooklyn, as a subway communters who needed to keep his hands free--for God knows what. I carry the bag, even though I've been commuting by car for going on twenty years.
The first time I went back to Ann Arbor, having been in New York City for many months, I was walking across the part of the University of Michigan campus known as "the Diag" and total strangers were smiling at me. Rather than making me feel good, it made me paranoid--is my fly open? what? I was like Joe Pesci in that gangster flick: "Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?"
I haven't ever gottn used to the necessity of making small talk with the neighbors, either. I understand entirely what drove you to walk around the block. I'm still "walking around the block."
None of this can be healthy.

Pentimento said...

Rodak, we are probably some sort of evidence of how the antisocial values of the large urban areas have destroyed the social fabric etc.

Rodak said...

I dunno. There is the paradox that in the Bronx I was very tight with the neighbors with whom I chose to be tight. I could ignore the strangers with whom I had no business to conduct, but my boys always had my back on the block. I don't have that here.
The locals, I suppose, have a version of it. But they seem to be much more catty and back-stabbing amongst themselves than did neighborhood New Yorkers.
As they used to say: "You gotta take the good with the bad." ;-)

Note: the word verification for this comment is "fauln." Is that pronounced "fallen?"

Pentimento said...

I agree that people seem pettier outside of NYC, but I suppose it's because there's less to do, which is why it appears that there's also a lot of recreational drug use and teen pregnancy around here . . .

Rodak said...

I'm just back from doing the "Krogering." I go early Sunday morning precisely because it is the time when the store is least populated by shoppers. Even with that, this is such a small town that I'm likely to run into people from work in the cereal aisle. This morning I got lucky. It's not that I don't like people; it's that I don't like forced small-talk and obligatory displays of socialization.

Pentimento said...

Now I'm back to my Proust fantasy of living in a cork-lined room and drinking coffee brewed with milk.

Rodak said...

...And I'm currently slogging through Swann's Way. (I made it to p.200 this morning.)

berenike said...

And they laugh at the English for ignoring each other ... 8-/

I am fascinated.

Pentimento said...

Well, hell is other people and all that.

Rodak said...

For my part, I'm neither bragging nor complaining. It's more along the lines of a mea culpa.

Mac said...

The content is very different, but the general vibe of y'all's conversation is reminding me of that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen (whatever the character's name is) meets Annie's family.

Perhaps it may make you feel a little better to know that I've been living in the same house for...lessee...18 years now, in a fairly well-defined (geographically) little neighborhood of a few dozen houses (in a town of less than 20,000, in the deep south) and I know the names of...lessee...exactly 5 families. I expect the total amount of time I've spent in conversation with all of them together over the past 12 months probably doesn't add up to an hour.

And 15 minutes or so of that occurred a couple of weeks ago when I met a neighbor out walking and heard a lengthy bit of evangelism for anarchism, ending with the recommendation that I check out a blog called the Arch-Druid Report. People are strange when you're a stranger.

And, as Janet said once, even stranger when you get to know them.

Pentimento said...

I laughed out loud about your neighbor, Mac, though perhaps I shouldn't have. We are all strange strangers indeed.