A Neighborhood's Fraying Fabric

Recently scanning through my journal entries from years ago, I was taken with just how many people have passed through my life. Scores and scores of coworkers, bandmates, classmates, neighbors, friends – even family members – who were once cornerstones of my existence, I no longer keep in touch with, not because of any conflict or falling out, but through a gradual decline of contact until there was no contact at all, a sort of relational evanescence. John Lennon wrote of such a phenomenon in the song “In My Life” when he was all of 25 years old, but I’m now 55; the number of people I once knew but no longer know is staggering.  

Making me feel even more uneasy is the change I’ve witnessed recently in my own town and neighborhood. One might be quick to undermine the superficial relationships that we naturally cultivate over time, but their absence can lead to a real sense of loss. When walking my dog to a nearby park, I used to have a 50/50 chance of running into someone I “kinda sorta” knew: Chris who watched Cubs games in the garage, Colleen who could talk my ear off with her banter, Margaret who’s oldest was in my daughter’s grade. Now all of them have moved away, as have several other neighbors who once lived on my street and other friends from my town who’ve opted for greener pastures further out in suburbia, or further still in states like Florida or Colorado.

Gradually, the fabric of the neighborhood as I once knew it is fraying. People who weaved in and out of my life have left dangling threads, and I’m beginning to feel that the ties that bind me to my home of 23 years are becoming looser, leaving me uneasily untethered.

I’m a creature of habit. I like my house and the stuff in it. I like walking the dog and seeing the same people every morning. I like sitting on my front porch with my wife and having familiar neighbors stroll by and say hello. I’d like it even more if my kids lived a few blocks away, stopping by for a quick chat or a Sunday dinner, but this is not to be, as none of my three children even live in the same state as me, much less the same neighborhood.

Carol King once sang, “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Very few it seems. And I fear becoming the last old guy on the street who people point to when discussing the history of the neighborhood. “Ask Paul. He’s been here forever.”

One day I may have to make the choice of either relocating simply to move with the times or staying put and becoming lost in time. I wish there was a third option: everyone staying where they are.

The Way We Communicated (or don't)

If you were to look back on my journal entries from, say, 1996, when I was living out east and newly married, you would see countless entries devoted to phone calls. Nearly every evening has an entry or several entries about the people I spoke with that day: siblings, parents, friends from college and high school…it seems that there was no shortage of people to talk to and things to talk about.

Flash forward nearly three decades, and phone calls are mostly a thing of the past. Even when they do occur they’re likely to be prefaced with a text. Calls can almost feel invasive or pushy now, though I still have a handful of friends who’ll call me occasionally out of the blue, and I cherish them (both the friends and the phone calls).

But as people have pointed out over the years, emails and texts don’t ring, or at least they don’t require that you pick up a receiver and converse right now. Back in the internet’s infancy, I recall responding to emails immediately. Today, people might be bombarded with a hundred emails or more a day, and responding to everything has simply become impossible. Some people (my wife, for example) struggle mightily with the prioritization and organization required to manage the unfortunate reality that there is always more to tackle, even when the work day is over.

When text messaging emerged, it was generally understood that they were more urgent then emails and required a fairly quick response, but after several years of this medium, I find that they too have been relegated to the same level of importance as emails: get to them at some point or maybe not at all.   

A month ago or so I tried to get a group of guys together via text message and got only one response.  After a little prodding I got two more, but several recipients simply didn’t respond at all, even after a week had past. Now, I don’t think anyone was maliciously ghosting me, but I do find the habit of not responding to invites – whether by mail, call, email or text – to be frustrating. It’s a foreign concept to me, but the reality is that people have changed their habits around previously established principles like, “when you receive a gift, you say thank you” or “when you receive an invitation, you respond.”  That’s no longer the case, and for those of us expecting old decorum under the new social order, it can be a rough ride.

(And please note, this has nothing to do with being old and scolding young people: I’m explaining habits of my own generation.)

So what to do with this trend? For my invitation to my friends, I pulled out and cancelled the event; I really had no choice. So what about the next event? Do I continue to send invitations to people who don’t respond? If they text me for something in the future, do I respond? I think yes, because it’s the right thing to do, but I also recognize that at some point I’m being a bit of a sucker – I’m practicing behavior that benefits others while not insisting that they behave similarly toward me. Alternatively, I could be very direct and say, “if you no longer respond to text invitations, I’m taking you off the invite list,” but this seems rather snarky and unlikely to encourage better behavior.

So, the end result is likely to be a) learn to live with it and be happy when your friends’ behaviors surprise you; or b) direct your energy elsewhere and hope for better results.

It’s a lousy choice to have to make.

Oh, The People You Know

About a decade ago, I met a man who went on a harangue about the moochers of society, and questioned why others felt they were entitled to receive assistance for things they could do themselves if they only set their minds to it.  He was a “pick-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps” kind of guy who had gone to college, worked several jobs to pay for it, earned a degree and was now making a good living.

Whether this type of mentality and the politics associated with it have any merit is open to debate, but what I’ve kept coming back to after all these years is the degree to which we benefit from the lives we intersect with, and how a seemingly minor vicissitude can impact us in big ways.  Dr. Suess wrote Oh, The Places You’ll Go, but Oh, the People You’ll Know would probably have been a bigger indicator of our futures.  Anyone in Nashville and Hollywood certainly knows this, but you needn’t pursue dreams of stardom to recognize how who you know is a gift that keeps on giving. 

Just last week I went on a free trip to the Caribbean thanks to my wife’s employer – the wife I would never have met had I not had the money and education to get into grad school.  And grad school was largely the result of my parents’ ability to raise me in an upper middleclass neighborhood in Brookfield, Wisconsin with high quality schools and safe streets.  The people I met during this time have, over the years, assisted me in ways large and small.  They’ve gotten me tickets to Packers and Brewers games, provided legal and financial advice, walked me through home improvement projects, offered lodging in interesting places, given me tips on purchases, doctors, technology – you name it.  Sure, I had a job at sixteen and worked relatively hard during high school, but my grandmother’s inheritance paved the way to a loan-free undergraduate degree, which resulted in a modest loan from grad school, which allowed my wife and me to pay off our car loan sooner, which gave us an opportunity to save more for my children’s college funds…

It’s all connected.  There’s no getting around the fact that I’m still benefitting from the relationships I established well over twenty years ago.

I think of the free air conditioning maintenance my generous neighbor has given me, the major discount my wife and I received from an old friend when we set up a will, the crazy talented musicians who’ve helped me record numerous CDs, the friend who created my website, and the computer geniuses who’ve resuscitated my desktop from certain death a number of times.

This list goes on and on.  And while I’ve dug myself out of a few holes in my lifetime, to think that I’ve lived in some sort of cocoon and didn’t benefit – and benefit dramatically – from the people I’ve met would be absurd. 

But here’s the kicker: how much different would these benefits had been had I grown up ten miles east of my childhood home?

Radio Essay on Letter Writing

Think letter writing is a lost art?  Well, you could write one yourself, you know.  My essay on letter writing broadcast on Milwaukee's NPR affiliate, 89.7 WUWM, on their Lake Effect program.

A Poem: Where We End Up

I dream of an outdated map

that highlights the location of a friend who lives nearby

but the friend hasn’t lived nearby in over twenty years.

The weight of this realization leads to dry tears

the kind only shed in dreams

but when I awake they’re the real deal.

And now begins another day, too early, too isolated.

They say the world is smaller than ever

but to me it is still too vast, too expansive.

I live in a place where many people have lived all their lives

and down the street are high school buddies

whom they see regularly.

Most of my high school friends don’t even live in the same time zone.

Geneva.  Munich.  Portland.

Might as well be Mars.  Jupiter.  Saturn.

We see each other once every year or two

only to return to the daily grind.

The modes of communication available to us now,

signals that traverse great distances in seconds

are underutilized.

Or unused entirely.

A man of God recently said to me, “It is not what you have or what you do.

It’s where you end up.”

Well then, let me offer a little prayer

for the finish line.

I hope we all end up living on the same block.

There I go again.  Dreaming.