Lockdown has had a positive side-effect: I've finally met my neighbors
Most weekday mornings, a few minutes before 8.00, the circling begins. Two young children and what looks like a parent appear, on bikes, in the church parking lot next to my house. They immediately begin riding in circles. Both kids look like they’re under six years old. Tuesdays and Thursdays, they tend to be with their dad; Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, they’re usually with their mom.
The morning circlings started suddenly – right after Minnesota’s stay-athome order was issued, to be exact. I’m working from home because of lockdown, and I can see this little family bicycling from my kitchen table.
“Let’s ride fast-fast-fast!” their mom will call, and the kids will zoom around on their tiny bikes, shrieking with excitement, their legs blurring. “OK, let’s slooooooow it down,” she’ll say, and they’ll compete to see who can pedal slowest without toppling over. There is so much giggling.
The circling ends promptly at 8.30am. They straggle home in a wobbly line, a zigzag of helmeted ducklings.
We live on a high-traffic street, and the closest park isn’t good for biking. A precise half-hour of circling with small children, every weekday morning since lockdown began?
These parents are switching off for each other’s 8am Zoom meetings.
The circling family – a family with small, noisy kids – lives only a few houses away from me, and I had no idea they existed. On our large city block, pre-lockdown, I couldn’t have told you if a single kid lived near me. Now kids are everywhere – lolling on the grass, gangling on stoops, sulking along on family walks, and … do they all live here? Where were they all before this? Did these kids never go outside before stay-at-home, or was I just never home long enough to notice them?
Is it both?
Whatever it is, since lockdown, something about the area where I live has fundamentally changed. For the first time in my adult life, I feel like I live in a neighborhood. A neighborhood with real neighbors, ones I recognize and wave to on my daily walks.
Lockdown has created the neighborhood that Sesame Street prepared me for as a child. It’s been a side-effect I hadn’t expected.
I grew up with 80s-era Sesame Street, pre-Elmo hitting the big time, thank God. It was just Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, the Count, Grover and Maria, the friendly lady who was always sitting on the stoop, waiting to chat or sing a song about sharing. Everyone knew everyone. The newsstand was open; Mr Hooper’s store was ready for business and a lesson in counting to 10 in Spanish.
Because of lockdown, this feels like the world I am suddenly living in. Now, I’ve been extremely lucky. I’ve been able to keep my job, and I’ve been able to work from home. I haven’t had to deal with the effects of the virus almost at all yet, so this is the different way of living I’ve been experiencing.
I now know my UPS driver. I noticed the day he switched from long brown pants to brown shorts, and was so happy, because I knew – without checking the weather – that it would finally be warm all week.
I know the wire-haired dachshund who goes for a hopping walk around the block twice a day. Toby. He wears little sweaters when it’s chilly and always sniffs a particular pine tree that flanks the parking lot.
The person across the street who has a cool dog isn’t just the person across the street any more – it’s Melissa (names changed) and her gentle English pitbull, Rania. I know this now, because after weeks of seeing her as I walked my dog, Elwood, every day during lockdown, she waved me over and invited Elwood into her fenced yard to play with Rania. Elwood hadn’t so much as sniffed another dog in over a month, and every inch of the fur on his back stood on end, electrified with the thrill of making a friend.
Recently, I dropped a postcard into the metal postbox on the corner, and the mailman, about to empty the box, stopped to chat with me for five whole minutes. We talked about what the dangers of being a mail carrier were right now and which gardens in the neighborhood were blooming early. Would I have chatted with him for so long two months ago? I’d like to think so, but I doubt it – our paths would never have crossed so often before the pandemic, and I wasn’t nearly so excited about meeting new people then. Believe me, now I am.
Everyone is outside, all of a sudden. Everyone is gardening in their tiny yard each evening. A few nights ago, I was sitting on a bench at the park, and a father and daughter brought a ball, a bat and a glove and started practicing hitting and catching. She kept missing the ball when she swung, and he just kept encouraging her and coaching her, and she started hitting the ball more often. And here’s the thing: there were so many people with time on their hands, just going for a stroll at dusk, that a tiny, socially distanced crowd formed and started clapping when she hit the ball. It was so wholesome I got teary-eyed.
I live in a city. If you live in a city, you know that you almost never meet or speak to your neighbors. I’ve shared apartment walls for years with people I’ve never met. Suddenly speaking to my neighbors feels a little thrilling, like we’re all crossing a once-forbidden boundary together.
“Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your ney-bor-hoood?” sang the Sesame Street puppets to me decades ago.
Lockdown continues. The little circling family bikes past my window, and I finally know the answer to that question.