My Neighborhood (rough, but a start of something bigger)

My dad, when he's in an especially good mood, or after he's had about nineteen cups of coffee, will sometimes call me and sing into the phone the old theme song from Mr. Rogers: "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, won't you be...my neighbor." The funny thing is that my dad doesn't live in a neighborhood, not even close. The houses on the street where I grew up, and where he still lives, are far from each other--as much as 5 or 6 acres separates us from the closest "neighbor." And although we know most of the people who live in the few houses at our end of the street, there is no sense of neighborhood at all--no block parties, borrowing of cups of milk or eggs, potluck barbecues, interaction whatsoever on a daily basis. This is not true of all parts of town. My cousins, for example, grew up on a little street where my aunt and uncle still live, and they had a neighborhood. The kids played together every day, the adults talked in their front yards, the teenagers babysat. Everybody knew everybody else, there were always other kids around, and from as far back as I can remember I was jealous of my cousins for this.

Throughout my childhood and adolesence, I sought this sense of community, the feeling of being a part of a group, in many ways I see now, although I have--ironically--always described myself to others as a person who craves solitude, avoids "joining," is not particularly social. Again, again, again, I think this is an idea of myself that I created, or settled on at some point in time and have stuck to out of sheer stubborness or inertia. Perhaps the fact that my father and sister are so manifestly extroverted played a part in this. I aligned myself early on with my mother, who is not an extrovert, and decided that like her, I was a predominantly solitary creature, self-contained--likable enough but not everybody's cup of tea.

But it is rather easy to view yourself with blinders half-on. As an adult, recently, in fact, I have realized something about myself that is counter to my lifelong self-assessments. I crave being part of a group. Although I am not particularly athletic (no need for jeers from the peanut gallery here), I never passed up an opportunity to participate in organized sports. I played three seasons a year from sixth grade through freshman year of college, when--for reasons I shall explain--I didn't need to anymore. Part of this is that I do like to play sports, in spite of lack of real ability, but a bigger part I think now is that I love to be part of a team. And I am a good teammate. I was the M.L. Carr of any team I was on--waving the white towel from the bench, as into the game as any of the stars, loving the action, the cameraderie, the grace of those with genuine talent, the shared emotion of victory and defeat.

Although I have always had this idea of myself on the sidelines, as an observer, this is also only half-true. I love organizing things: parties, performances, events of any kind. I feel bizarrely at home speaking to a large group, giving speeches or making toasts in public, reading to strangers, hosting events. And I have been told enough that I must give it some credence that the awkwardness I feel in such situations is not readily apparent to others. As it turns out, I'm not really that shy. I can be a bit of a ham. How does this happen? How do we get so stuck in a groove, hearing the same off note over and over, that we end up putting our hands over our ears and blocking out the background noise that might present a more harmonious, flattering sound?

I said I would explain one of the reasons I stopped playing team sports, and the main one is because as soon as I got to college, the very first hour, I knew I had been waiting all my life to live in a dorm. Some people, many, many reasonable ones, loathe communal living. And it is true that dorms are dirty, loud, smoky, cramped, crowded, often nasty places inside, even those with exteriors as beautiful as Vassar's. But in my first dorm I finally found myself in a neighborhood, and I loved everything about it, even dealing with the objectively less desirable factors: the mouse who lived in my closet, the girl on my floor who decided she hated me for no reason, the waits for the showers, the items of clothing that were borrowed and never returned, the nights when I wanted to sleep and everyone else on my floor wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway, and the nights when I wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway and everyone else wanted to sleep.

In this first dorm, I had two roomates. If one was mad at me, the other one wasn't, or vice versa, and sometimes the three of us talked late into the night. "Are you guys asleep?" one of us would whisper, and off we'd be. On the best nights, practically everyone on the hall piled into our room, or someone else's room, and we all talked, "Jungle Love" playing quietly on the stereo, people appearing, peeling off, on their own terms, on their own time: this, this was my neighborhood. If I needed a red plaid flannel shirt (this was 1988, people) because my blue one was dirty, a knock on the door across the hall would produce one. If it was 4:30 in the morning and my paper on Rastafarianism was barely begun, someone else was up too, and would give me a Diet Coke to get me through the pre-dawn hours.

I knew that everyone else did not love dorm life. They talked about it all the time. Most of my friends, in fact, coveted single rooms, and so I went along, got my own for sophomore year, and liked it too, liked being able to shut the door sometimes and be alone. But I never stopped being made giddily happy by the near-constant knocks on the door, the notes pinned to my messageboard saying could I have dinner at 7?, the raps on the wall exchanged with my friend in the room next door as we lay in our separate beds, alone, a wall between us, but parts of the same living whole.