On hazy hot summer days, I sit on the porch waiting for the rain. I’m patient enough, but the clouds and the rain don’t care, one way or the other. Forty-three years on this porch, they come and go, rain and shine.
A family with four boys and a portable basketball hoop are our newest neighbors and for them, I enjoyed measuring out the free throw line this spring that’s on our part of the shared driveway. “Give me a shot,” that’s all I ask, and I was as surprised as they were when my two-hand-set-shot clunked off the backboard and went in. “Now, we have to have a jump-ball,” I said, and they were polite to the old guy from another century, but they didn’t know what to make of those gestures. These days, being a nice guy is as antiquated as a two-door sedan. Some call it naive; I consider it a form of resistance. Empathy. Social-ism. Dirty words from the 1900s.
Mostly, I’ve forgotten the names of the people who have lived on either side of us a block from Adams High School. Our stay began in our first year as parents, next door to the old couple that we are now: slow dissolve film lovers as Bob and Annabel become Sid and Judy, in their 70s with two grown children. We haven’t changed much, but the world flies by and now I’m simply hoping that the boys next door think fondly of the old folks who were next door when they moved in, too. It’s cleaner than that actually, nothing deliberate about it. I’m in-the-moment happy to dig through 40 years’ worth of stuff in an old garage, over the cluttered work bench for the snap-dragging yellow tape measure. Rooting around, I couldn’t find the blue or the pink or the yellow or the green sidewalk chalk but 15 feet from the backboard is right where our garage door begins so let that be your mark, guys. Give me another shot.
I do hope that when we’re gone, they’ll have a moment of ‘Sid and Judy made us feel welcome.’ Bob and Annabel did that for us. I’d like them to remember our names.
Bob and Annabel’s house is a home for out-of-town guests now, with absentee owners and mostly people connected to Notre Dame, I gather from game days, people who come and go without looking up to see the strangers they are never going to know anyway, so why bother. Like the strangers in the aisle at Costco. Not like the people at The Builder’s Store. I’m no better; I won’t bother to know them, either. I sit on the porch ruminating on whether what’s “good for the economy” is the god it’s made out to be and yelling silently at the clouds. ‘Will it ever rain?’
It’s easier to remember the old names than the new ones. Back on the driveway side, I remember Kermit and Peggy, and Ed, but names between them and our newest neighbors are hard to come by. It’s like trying to remember the Presidents before and after Lincoln.
Ed had a big American SUV with half-a-million miles on it that he himself kept running. Was Ed a hydraulics engineer? I think that’s right. Mostly, I remember that he was a good guy. He did a lot of work on his house, too, lent his neighbors a hand, and always seemed to know what he was doing. He moved to Michigan.
The pickup trucks have become an ordinary constant now, evolving like the dinosaur waste they consume on a new road to extinction. They don’t fit anymore. Driveways and garages constructed in the 1920s weren’t made for them so they sit on the street as back on the porch, I ponder whether the next extinction meteor has already arrived in the form of us. After Ed another big truck driveway-sharing neighbor told us one morning that the night before someone stole his handgun from his glove compartment. The ordinariness of a glove compartment gun only triggers an observation that ‘I shoulda locked the door.’ Nothing more.
I can remember that the noises from a single man who immediately followed Bob and Annabel into the house next door were a mystery. Our kids’ sideways glances implied that their parents, being also adults, were responsible and capable of an explanation for his late-night guttural howls and groans. But we weren’t and a ‘We don’t know’ was our best response. Growing up anywhere means learning to move beyond the disappointment that one’s parents don’t have all the answers.
One year, when Matt was a senior and Lily a freshman, they provided an illustration suited for an above average greeting card as they walked together down the block to Adams, literally into the sunrise. That’s 25 years ago, now, and both of them, children of this neighborhood, are doing well.
With that, I can convince myself that should it happen, when today’s rain is over, the boys next door will be fine.
