My mental circus, inside and out.

It's that deep part of summer in Emma' s town.  Hot, humid, a time for dozing in the afternoon.  The sounds of bees and air conditioners.  Emma went out to the bar with her neighbor, Helena, who runs the local Move On chapter, and Mona, an old friend.  They got to talking about neighborliness.  Mona lives in one of these new suburbs, the kind that have names like Hyde Park or Nottingham Woods.  Hers is called "Hawk's Nest" and all the houses in it are built by Mayberry Homes.  The houses are pleasant though very tightly packed in. Mona said that the builders called themselves Mayberry Homes because in their consumer research they had found that home buyers wanted. . well. . Mayberry.  Opie and Pa and probably especially Aunt Bee.   The irony is that Mona has never met her neighbors.  She knows that one of the university administrators lives across from her, a woman who comes home every night at 1am and turns on a light for ten minutes.  This is the only sign of her.  The geese are more friendly.  Mona lives with her very elderly mother who spends her days watching the geese teach their goslings to fly out on the undeveloped, marshy land bordering their backyard.  Mona and her mother are more attached to the geese and the muskrats on the pond than their mysterious neighbors.  Emma has often driven through this neighborhood and seen no sign of human life, though the yards are all neatly tended.  There appear to be children, from the playground equipment in some backyards, but she has never seen children.  There are decks on all of the houses with nobody on them.  It's like someone set off one of those neutron bombs that wipe out all life while leaving the architecture intact.  It's Mayberry after the apocalypse.

Emma's and Helena's neighborhood has more signs of human life.  People go for walks, amble around in their yards doing the gardening, greet each other, sometimes plow each other's walks.  But Helena says that there is a pocket of the neighborhood where all the math professors have lived for twenty years and have never been inside each other's homes. 

Emma has heard of other corners of local neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody else's business--they spy on each other.  This is the opposite end of the Mayberry dream, the nightmare the Stasi might like.  Emma wonders what they would think of that white convertible parked in her driveway twice a week all night.  Or the times balding Horsh rides up in his leather jacket and his Honda motorcycle, which the kids think is a sure sign of midlife crisis

Being home for the summer for the first time in many years, Emma is thinking about the quality of neighborliness, what the ideal neighborhood would be like.  Empathy and tolerance, that's what Emma would like to see in her neighborhood.  She wonders sometimes what would happen if somebody just busted loose in her neighborhood, decorated it like one she has seen in the poorer part of town, with huge Aztec gods painted on the garage doors, dozens of mobiles hanging on the porch, and a ton of garden gnomes and yard "art."  In that part of town, the part with peeling paint and dusty yards,  people sit out on their porches with music blaring through the living room windows, greeting each other.   Down by the river, old guys stand around together fishing, staring down into the current for hours. They don't seem to need to talk.  Emma wonders what they see, what they think about. Those are racially diverse neighborhoods; whereas Emma's street has only one black family.  There are probably fewer in Hawk's Nest.

Emma's neighborhood often seems like utopia to her.  But it does have a repressed quality about it, an averageness. Nobody wants to damage the housing value, and that is determined by averageness.  There's nothing too startling or out of the ordinary.   The grass never gets over 6 inches high.  There are no emotional displays or loud talk.   Creativity is expressed only through gardening, or painting one's house seafoam instead of beige.  Since she really loves her neighborhood, Emma wonders if she herself is like that.

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 18, 2008 18:36 | link | comments (2)

Comments:

#1  19 July 2008 - 00:15

 

"mayberry after the apocalypse" -- love that phrase. made me spew my tea.

we live in sort of a "lower-end" neighborhood -- racially diverse, but mostly hispanic. everybody is outside in the evenings, music blaring, grills going, kids playing ball in the street, dogs, guys working on cars, etc.

some friends and family who visit definitely look down their noses at our neighborhood and lock their cars -- but personally i love it and wouldn't have it any other way.

limine

#2  20 July 2008 - 18:38

 

I, too, laughed at that wonderful "mayberry after the apocalypse."

We live in an area that hasn't been a "neighborhood" since they widened the road over 15 years ago. The people we knew once upon a time are now dead, and people are beginning to use some of the homes for offices. We've been spending the summer adjusting our home to fit our post-children, busy, work- and travel-filled lives.

So home is home to us, even without being part of a neighborhood, but I've spent a lot of time lately in an area where I am a minority, and I have to say I've learned a lot about myself and other people. I would like Limine's neighborhood, but I also think I'd like your neighborhood. Perhaps there is a combination of roots and rootlessness at work, and it appeals.

InMyLife

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