Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Matthew 5 (again)

In his sermon of stepping-it-up, of moving past the old law and firmly into the new, Jesus notes that his listeners have "heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy." Then he tells us to love our enemy too.  But I sheepishly admit that I had always attributed the "love thy neighbor" part to the new law, not the old.  It's so basic that Jesus even adds to it.  But I am still struggling with that old law.

Just today my boys were listening to the Sesame Street song "Who Are The People in Your Neighborhood?" where the Muppets sing to the mailman, the fireman, "the people that you meet when you're walking down the street."  I'm fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood that is established and friendly, where people do go for walks (or jogs) regularly and many have shared the same block for more than half their lives.

After almost 9 years, I know our neighborhood well enough to dilute it down to basic descriptions, a series of facts. I know 70-something Gordon, on the corner, who eats fruit snacks while watching "Dancing with the Stars" to get him through the long winter nights, his oxygen tube snaking through the house. Gordon whose dead mother's car has spent 8 years parked in our carport because he can't bear to get rid of it and has no room in his own antique-logged garage.  Gordon who, after 20 some odd years of eating microwave dinners, discovered one night at our dining table that he loves home-cooked lasagna.

I know the three older single ladies, two widowed and one a divorcee.  Collectively they've lived on the street for about 130 years; one has lived in two houses on the same side of the street.  One called us weekly after her husband passed away to see if we'd want some of his old things.  After several visits (always longer than expected - she's a talker, and her company has thinned significantly), my husband had lugged home at least 4 garbage bags full of everything from old dress shirts to adult diapers and wipes. (Not sure why she thought of us, but my husband is of the nod-and-smile-and-say-thank-you stock.)  On the last visit, he came home laden with one case of KY jelly, two sets of plastic sheets, and one cowboy hat.  I'm still not sure what use her husband had been making of these, but we've never dared ask, and luckily she's never inquired as to how they're coming along at our house.

I know the families with their high school daughters driven or walked home by boyfriends, the girls who are the best babysitters, their mothers who cook or knit and drive minivans. Fathers keep vigil, surreptitiously, behind their lawnmowers, the hum of those engines thrumming the air summer mornings.  These are all easy to love.

And Queen of the neighborhood, our next door neighbor, part Mother Theresa, part Martha Stewart, is Jackie, who has lived 50 of her 86 years on our block, whose parents built the red brick rambler, started the half-acre garden on the west and planted the half dozen fruit trees that, until last year, Jackie sprayed and pruned herself, perched on a silver ladder that, if anything, could have been a stairway to heaven.  She would have made it too.  I've lost count of the number of cinnamon rolls, cookies, candies, and baby gifts she's delivered to our house.  She and her husband refer to my sons as "our boys" and every birthday give the birthday boy a small stash of candy tucked neatly in a letter that always closes with "we sure do love you."  She's the rarest commodity in neighborhoods now.  Not only does she know everyone, she loves them.

One day we were both out doing yard work, Jackie watering her giant Bleeding Hearts and me struggling to resurrect the hollyhocks, when the hillbillies that lived kitty-corner from my back fence started yelling at their kids again.  The bantam rooster (the most charming creature at their residence) had finally stopped crowing for a minute and the volume and breadth of their chaos could be fully appreciated.  Between the cars parked on the front lawn and the bonfires on the back, they'd been flying their redneck flag pretty high.   Their dilapidated cream house sat to the southeast of me, and I had done my best for five years to completely ignore them.  On the west of me, Jackie tended her flowers and called out to her dogs.  I was gathering the last of my dirty trowels when I heard the woman call out, "Hi, Jackie!"and looked up in time to see her hand shoot up in the air and wave enthusiastically.  Jackie, three houses away, hollered over a hello, laughed and asked the woman how she was doing.  Their conversation was brief but personable.  I stood there in shock, dumb as a garden gnome between them.  I realized that, to Jackie, there are none of "those people."

Wendell Berry writes that "a community is not merely a condition of physical proximity...  A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each others' lives.  It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.... The charity that grows out of regard for neighbors with whom one expects to live one's life is both a discipline and a reward; and the charity that, knowing no neighbors, contributes to funds and foundations is, from the personal standpoint, only an excuse."  Of course, someone has already said this.  Love thy neighbor as thyself.  And to love someone, really, you have to know them, beyond basic facts.  You share your life with them.

I still can't figure out how Jackie knew that family.  Their houses didn't connect.  They didn't attend church together.  They had nothing in common.  And yet, Jackie knew when they moved and was sorry to see them go.

If I'm going to actually start living what the New Testament teaches, I've got to do some things that are awkward in the onset.  There are currently 2 neighbors on my block I don't know well enough to feel comfortable around.  One is the boyfriend of the girl next door.  (Fortunately, a nice boyfriend, unlike the last one.) The other is the neighborhood pariah.  He seems less Boo Radley, more Oscar the Grouch.  But maybe as he drives up or down the street in his Jeep, I could do something monumental, something I've never done before.  I could wave.