Neighbors

Last week, a couple of kids from down the street came over every day after school to play and then came over on Sunday, too. I should be happy about this because one of my quibbles with our house is that our neighborhood doesn’t have many children. But of course, not only did I just read about Chinese mothering and feel guilty about how little oversight I give my kids’ school work, but I also don’t really have much affection for these particular kids, a brother and sister aged 5 and 9.

Not that these are bad children; they just lack imagination.  We have some friends who have kids who are full of ideas, who never ask to watch tv or play video games, who my kids love to have over.  But that's not these kids.  One day I returned home from picking up my younger kids a few minutes after my older sons had been dropped off by their afterschool ride, and my boys had let these kids in and turned on the Wii for them, even though we have a no-Wii on school days policy.

I don’t know these kids well, or their family at all, but the fact that they wander the street every day after school and that one day their mother was driving down the street at 7 looking for them, doesn’t give me a very good impression of their home life. I lectured my sons about letting them in when I wasn’t home, but I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty for doing so.

That particular day the brother and sister showed up because they were locked out of their house and the babysitter, who lives a few doors down, wasn’t home. When dinner time rolled around, we sent the kids home, but still no one was there, so they came back and ate dinner with us. Apparently, the mother and the babysitter had a miscommunication. But now these kids keep asking if they can eat dinner with us. It’s like we’ve fed stray dogs. They come over after school, play a couple minutes, and then ask for snacks. A lot of snacks. I remind them to say please and thank you to slow them down. Then they stay until we send them home.

So one minute I’m irritated that I’m feeding these mannerless children. The next minute I’m feeling guilty for my resentment and reluctance. My lack of charity. We watched The Blind Side not long ago, and it had its intended effect – it made me feel that I need to do more for the poor. Since I don’t have a class at the community college this semester, I keep meaning to volunteer at St. Vincent de Paul - another resolution I need to act upon.

But here are these kids: I don’t know if they are “poor;” their mother has a job; I haven’t asked if they have a dad around, but they don’t mention him – and I want them to go away. They obviously are less well off than us, because they like our boring house so much. I am embarrassed to mention my coldheartedness. I want to help faceless people. I don’t want to be inconvenienced by children who may not be a good influence, who want to eat the food in my pantry, not what I bought to give away, who interrupt me when I’m trying to make dinner for my own family.  I know I need to be generous to them, but I also want to protect my own children. 

Is setting a good example of generosity and hospitality more important than protecting?

Encomium

Continuing with the theme of death, the other day my mother sent me a clipping of an obituary of our old next door neighbor. Until the time I was seven, my family lived in Indianapolis on the east side in the same neighborhood where my mother and father had gone to high school and where my grandmother had grown up. For a long time, that place was home, and the place we moved to was the “new house.” The new house had a rural route number, although it was on a street of newer houses surrounded by cornfields. The first house was in a neighborhood of small bungalows and cape cods nestled close together that now must be nearing the century mark.

Our house was a little limestone number with green trim. It had a low roof like a bungalow but no front porch. Instead, the front yard was graced by a crabapple tree in one corner and a redbud in the other, and by the front door was a little imitation courtyard garden, with a wrought fence enclosing bleeding hearts, lily of the valley, and daffodils, all clustered under a small dogwood tree. In my memory it was glorious – straight from the pages of a Tasha Tudor book. But when as an adult, I drove by with my husband, all those colors in the front yard had vanished.

The inside wasn’t quite as quaint: gold shag carpet, lattice wallpaper with big yellow flowers, wallsized mirror in the living room. Green shag carpet covered the back bedroom that Betty and I shared with a big green piano. That room, I think, had been a porch and had indoor/outdoor carpet when we first lived there. My first brush with home decorating was when my parents put in real carpet. I remember wanting to sleep on that plush surface with all my stuffed animals.


So that little house was cozy, but not beautiful on the inside. On the other hand, the neighbors' house, a white cape cod, was all loveliness. The couple who lived there had grown children who visited sometimes but not for long. These neighbors were kind and warm, unlike the neighbor on the other side of us, who seemed the incarnation of Mr. McGregor. I would climb on the wooden fence in the backyard and call to the nice neighbors for an invitation. And sometimes – often? -- they would invite me to come over. The Mr. mostly did yard work like the neighbor on the opposite, but he let us jump in his leaf piles. The Mrs., whom I called by her first name, would invite me in for little cucumber/Wonderbread sandwiches with the crusts cut off. We would practice good manners. She tried to teach me to knit. She taught me "Pretty is as pretty does" when I went fishing for compliments (or maybe to lower my expectations to a more fitting level for a homely child). 

The highlight of my visits were following her upstairs to the room with eaves and dormers where her daughter’s dolls were kept. This room was pink and green, my favorite color combination, and the bedspread was frilly and girlish. Was there a white wicker vanity or am I making that up? I don’t remember actually playing there, only gazing in awe at the dolls and books, as if visiting a museum to 1960’s girlhood. I wonder if that room was ever redecorated after we moved away.


According to the obituary, a long, informative one, the Mr. and Mrs. were married over 50 years when the Mr. died in 1995. By the time I knew them, they were retired, but previously they both worked relatively unglamorous jobs – she was a secretary at a steel company. But having a glamorous job apparently wasn’t what motivated her. She apparently enjoyed community life, as the obituary lists her membership in several clubs, activities at her church, and her work as a docent at the Benjamin Harrison Home, where she wore period dresses to give tours to schoolchildren. The couple travelled to Europe and went out dancing until they were in their eighties. Someone cared enough to include in the obit small details such as that the Mrs. was a book lover and an avid newspaper reader. I love this bit: “Until she became ill, she was still enjoying going out to lunch each week, always wearing red lipstick and high heels.” In addition to a list of survivors, the obit lists a number of friends and caregivers to whom thanks were owed. Contributions were directed to the Methodist Church down the street from the house in the old neighborhood.


What a full, happy life. What a gift was her kindness to little girls. I’m sorry that as an adult I never told her how thankful I am for those memories, although thanks were probably unnecessary. She likely enjoyed our little tea parties as much as we did.

Running around

Inspired by her grandfather’s paintings of exotic places, Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius wanted to do three things: travel the world, settle by the sea, and the most difficult, make the world a more beautiful place. She does this by planting lupines all over her village, where they bloom in profusion, multiplying each year. What am I doing to make the world a more beautiful place? Planting children? This is one of those picture books that the kids never ask to hear, but every once in awhile I check it out from the library and get choked up while reading it aloud.



Now here I am, getting to see a bit of the world here and there, settling by the sea. But this is not a place to plant lupines. Too hot in the summer, not cold enough in the winter. But this town is a place that probably once was beautiful in spots, and maybe could be again, if not everyone flees to the new developments north of Highway 10.



Nearly every day I run. I try to get in 2-5 miles. Running has been one of the few constants in my life; it may be an addiction. But it allows me to clear my head, exercise the dog, spend time with whatever kids are in the babyjogger, daydream, get fresh air, feel less guilty about the amount of chocolate I consume, and get to know my neighborhood.



If I leave my house and turn one direction, I end up at the bay. I take this route most often because it has little traffic, plenty of shade, and the distance is just about right. This is not a resort area, but there are piers and a scenic island, some random wild flowers in the sidewalk cracks: some that look like what my grandfather called rock roses, or portaluca. This route circles around a neighborhood on a point that juts into the bay. Here large homes are shaded by stately live oaks dripping Spanish moss and tropical plants add color. A number of vacant plots remain from Katrina, one with the Adirondack chairs decaying on a cement foundation on my masthead. There are also a few new homes being constructed in large beach house fashion: big porches with ceiling fans, long windows, taupe hardyboard with white trim… Big boats park at piers in front of these homes.



If I turn the other direction, I run into the Air Force Base. On this route, I feel safe and secure but there’s not much to look at. Big open spaces. Few pedestrians. Fewer flowers.

If I skip past the Air Force base and go on, I hit the projects next to the railroad tracks, the trailer park, the house with tarp covering missing sections of roof, boarded up, surrounded by jalopies, overgrown shrubbery. A few of the homes here have a southern cottagey feel – deep porches with gingerbreading, long windows, garden ephemera in disarray, evidence of a more gentile past. But for the most part, they are small, deteriorating boxes providing shelter for people who work long hours for little pay. Or for those who don’t work at all. Someone at church saw me running here one day and told me I shouldn’t be on that road alone. Her comment worried me, and I avoided this route for awhile. But then I figured people live here, survive the shudders when the trains pass every day, meet at the pawn shop, sit on their porches and wave at each other or don’t, ignore the pit bulls, the rottweiler, and two enormous mastiffs who pace their chain linked boundaries. And they survive, although perhaps only because they block out thoughts of the many miseries they suffer.

Once I hit the Gulf Coast beach, I feel less like I need to move quickly. On Sunday mornings the only people on the beach are a few fishermen, some aging women walkers, and vagrants with nowhere else to go. The odor emanating from the casino parking garage when I pass by leads me to believe they might sleep in there or hide from the daily rainshower.  I don't see many homeless people hanging out near the cemetary on this route, though, despite the fact that it an outhouse, water pumps, and shelters over some of the gravesites.  I'd like to think that there is an understood reverence for the graveyard, but perhaps there is a greater fear of ghosts.

One of my son’s friends said our neighborhood is scary, as I mentioned before. When we were househunting, we looked at some more suburban neighborhoods, where the school friends live, that were newer subdivisions north of the highway, undamaged by hurricanes, neat, orderly communities with covenants. They were clean and safe, but I couldn’t imagine living in a house with wall to wall white carpet, and I didn’t know where I would run, except in circles around the neighborhood, because these developments emptied onto busy streets where pedestrians are at the mercy of drivers in a hurry to get to Walmart or work or wherever. The house we chose is pocketed between moderate wealth and poverty, government property and city slums, but it is in what was once a pedestrian friendly spot. If you squint your eyes at the bay or walk to the beach and shade your eyes with your hands, you can close out the bridges and traffic and trash and pretend you are on a desolate island for a couple seconds.

So here I am near the sea like Miss Rumphius. Is there something I can do to make this place more beautiful?

photos from the fall

Fairy Tales

from vannessagx on flickr

Finished Welty's The Robber Bridegroom a couple nights ago and was reminded of how much I enjoy fairy tales. The old English Fairy Tales collection illustrated by Arthur Rackham that I used to pour over at my grandparents' house stands a little dusty now in the kids' room (not that any sisters can take it...). The boys, while loving fantasy, haven't had a taste for Jack the Giant Killer or the Grimms' dark tales, and I feel a little at fault. Every once in a while we pick up a more richly illustrated copy of something like Anderson's sorrowful "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" at the library, but they tend to prefer fast, funny, plot driven series books to the short, frightening stories I used to love to read (and my oldest just checked out a Tom Clancy - perhaps inspired by our viewing of The Hunt for Red October). 

Welty's story captures the sing song tone of fairy tales and the gruesome colorful characters without sounding like some of the contemporary recycled versions of a wornout tale with heavy emphasis on morality, which most of these old fairy tales lack. The beautiful maiden elopes with the bandit and lives happily in sin and in ignorance of her lover's identity (a Cupid and Psyche twist) until the foolish boy Goat foils an Indian massacre, saves their lives, but reveals the identity of the bandit to all. So the bandit and the maiden, after a brief separation, run away to make a fabulous fortune after stopping briefly to be wed. No morals anywhere, but a great tale.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any American fairy tale writers other than Washington Irving right now - Mark Twain maybe? Add fairy tales - and their illustrations - to the list of things to love. And I also love the little local toy store where I stumbled on a collection of fairy tale illustrations today. Resisted the temptation to buy.

Last night while working Bingo for our parish tuition subsidy, I heard another sort of fairy tale, along with a lot of fascinating gossip and restaurant reviews.  One of my fellow "volunteers" is the granddaughter of a woman whose parents immigrated from Yugoslavia. When her mother died, the grandmother dropped out of 3rd grade to help take care of her 4 brothers and little sister. Meanwhile, the father went about his business making a fortune from shrimping and fishing. First he bought a boat. Then he bought a pier. Then he bought a warehouse and a packaging plant. Eventually he had quite a conglomerate of fishing industry businesses.  He sold most of this to the Starkist company for $72 million. A rags to riches story. Eventually, his heirs leased some additional waterfront property to the Grand Casino for 5% of their monthly income.  The twist is that in Yugoslavian culture, only the sons could inherit money, so the poor sisters were left penniless, not even given a freezer of fish after the Starkist deal. This wealth is still floating around Biloxi, and the woman, the granddaughter, telling this story has kids who now go to school with their extremely wealthy cousins, while their dad manages the Domino's district here. Could make for some jealousy.

I'm still fighting jealousy over neighborhood envy.  Another outcome of working Bingo (aside from learning how to make fries in the little basket dipped in hot oil, in case I ever am desperate for a job), is that I have had my running routes curtailed, after hearing that I must be crazy for running on a couple of these streets. We don't have many children on our street anyway - a baby across from us, and some teenagers on the corner. And we don't have any easy carpool mates.  And then today, J's friend commented that he wouldn't want to trick or treat in our neighborhood because it looked all foggy and rundown and some one might put drugs in the candy. To which B replies, "Yeah, our neighborhood is pretty seedy." 

All the doors are locked, and the outside lights lit.

I knew the neighborhood was sketchy when we were looking at renting in it. Too close to the casinos and the water. We drove around the part of Bayview to the left with the pretty waterside houses, not the neighborhood to the right with boarded up, overgrown ones.  Suddenly I feel nervous driving on the streets after dark.

But then I have to remind myself that the people who live in these old rundown houses are people, too. They want to come home after a long day at work.  I could be robbed or accidentally shot in a good neighborhood, too.  The St. Vincent de Paul society feeds hundreds of people a month (I tried to volunteer but couldn't do much unless I had childcare for my 3 yr old because schizophrenics and molesters come in the office). Just as there is great wealth in this area, there's great poverty. 

It's easier to feel nervous than to feel compassion. Having to readjust to what it means to be a good neighbor.