Won't you be my neighbor?
No one comes to the door anymore
I’ve never been one for illicit substances but, from what I’ve read, I think the way I respond to my HOA WhatsApp group is how some people respond to meth. It’s just one app where either I open it and get overjoyed that there’s a small uprising against the neighborhood queen bees (and I mean, OVERJOYED - like gleefully telling Jeff “someone’s pushing back on Debbie!!!”) or I become incredibly annoyed that instead of just walking an incorrectly delivered package to someone’s house, we have to post about it for 150 people to read.
Moving here, I told Jeff I was going to engage in the neighborhood. In New York, I obviously never knew my neighbors even if the whole Monica/Rachel and Chandler/Joey dynamic had led me to think we’d be best friends. Same in DC where any interest in getting to know people in the building was shut down when I found a note left on the dryer that said “Dear Laundry Girl” from someone with the email address “orbitingmars@yahoo” or hotmail or one of those. Someone hitting on you via index card after potentially having gone through your clothes really changes your feelings about interacting with strangers.
When we were in Michigan, in the first place we lived, everyone was either an international ice dancer (because we were within walking distance of the rink) or a divorced dad — always very very easy to tell those two populations apart. Later, we bought a home in a really lovely community but no one was very friendly. Our elderly neighbors on one side, Mary and John, were supposedly very nice but they died less than a year into us living there (natural causes).
On the other side, I was always very confused about their son because he seemed to be Benjamin Button. I thought when I first met them he was like 6 or 7 but then when I saw him later he looked more like 4. The next year when they had no son and a daughter, I realized it was a different family. The new family explained the house was used as corporate housing by their automotive supplier employer and actually there would have been four different families who lived there by the time I noticed. I’m not sure if it’s just Michigan weather keeping people inside for much of the winter or that no one had pets so they were never walking them. Obviously the other explanation is that I didn’t care that much and didn’t put enough effort into building neighbor relationships.
When we moved here, I thought with it being a new community, I’d be able to make friends easily. However, most people here are either young families with children not yet school-aged or empty nesters. There are three other Karens and I’m the youngest by at least 15 years. While it seemed welcoming at the start, there’s very obviously an “in crowd” led by a small group who wield a few key powers: namely planning the block party and updating the “neighborhood directory” spreadsheet which they will not make a Google sheet for reasons I’m assuming are tied to their MacArthur-esque need for control.
Two years ago, they sent out a call for volunteers to join the block party planning committee and I raised my hand only for them to tell me they’d decided not to have a committee. Then on the day of the block party, we had to all applaud the committee for their great work. Two of the other Karens were on it.
I’m okay not being in the “inner circle” (which, ironically, is also where all these people live, while we are on the outer edge which is better for views and property value but not popularity). It is, however, a stark contrast from my own experience growing up. My neighborhood as a child was a small one where all the kids met on one corner to walk to school together. Where multiple backyards had “cut throughs” to get to other people’s houses. Where we had numerous traditions including Easter Egg Hunts and Christmas Caroling parties — the latter of which never made much sense to me since if you, as a neighborhood, go caroling in your neighborhood, no one is home to receive said carols… but the point was to be together and for the adults to drink mulled wine.
Our dog, Houston, was easily the most popular member of our family and on weekends would leave our house and trot around the neighborhood; at least two people who didn’t have dogs kept treats for him. In contrast, Dmitry, in my current neighborhood, takes pictures of dogs he sees off the leash, even if the owner is standing with them and posts them passive aggressively to WhatsApp alongside the screenshot of the HOA guidelines saying dogs must be leashed at all times. There’s also one woman who was incensed at dog poop on her driveway and said if she’d caught it on her ring camera, she would “hunt down whoever’s dog did this and rub their face in it” only for someone to explain to her that it was a fox.
Quite the chasm between experiences and it can’t all be because of technology.
I’ve been thinking about the sense of belonging fostered by that neighborhood so much lately after losing a true pillar of the community who passed away recently — to be clear, “pillar of the community” is sometimes thrown around but could not be more accurate in describing him. It’s very hard to explain the sense of loss you feel when you lack the appropriate vocabulary to label the person, especially now that “neighbor” doesn’t carry with it the endearment it did when I lived in my small Quaker town. I even realize that last sentence lacks the specificity needed to make my point but I truly don’t know the right word and all attempts (e.g. “almost an uncle,” “second family,” “framily,” etc) fall flat.
We moved once in my childhood, from one side of the Smiths to the other (actually, I’m realizing right now, we moved from the inner circle to the outer edge) and the closeness was never just physical proximity; truly there has never been a moment I’ve spent with them or in their home when I didn’t feel I was with family. It’s really hard not to mention Halloween: their house was that house. The one everyone wanted to go to and even if they didn’t live nearby changed their trick or treating route to accommodate. It was the house with the decorations and sound effects and, yes, full-sized candy bars. It was just scary enough to keep teenagers entertained but not make little kids too upset.
A highlight was a box where you could pet their dead dog “Fluffy,” and when you reached your hand in, you were supposedly touching raw meat. Something I never questioned until I started writing this and was like… there’s no way a lawyer invited hundreds of children to touch raw meat in the 90s pre-hand sanitizer era.
It’s probably not worth comparing to my current neighborhood where people announced they were setting up card tables on the driveway so kids didn’t have to come to the door at all. While Jeff is generally forbidden from participating in the WhatsApp group because of the crazies, I did let him post that we would be happy to give candy to any kids who came to the door “old school style.”
What I didn’t understand when I was trick-or-treating, or cutting through backyards, or walking to school in a group, was that those things don’t just happen. Someone builds them; someone decides that a box with raw meat in it is worth the effort, that the caroling party is the point even if no one’s home to hear it, that a dog named Houston deserves a treat (or a Pepperidge Farm cookie) from someone who doesn’t even own a dog.
The families in my old neighborhood built that over years of showing up for each other at all of those events. And in the years since we haven’t lived nearby, the showing up continues including regular drinks in DC, full families flying to Mexico and Japan for weddings, bridal and baby showers, and more recently flying in, no matter what, for memorials.
I’m not sure I’ll ever have that. Partly it’s this neighborhood with its card tables and its WhatsApp surveillance and its “inner circle.” But honestly it’s also that the way most people build those relationships — through kids in school together, through soccer practice waiting, through the particular intimacy of other people watching your children grow up — was never available to me and that time has now passed. With kids past their school years, the on-ramp I didn’t know I’d need had already closed.
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