Not long after my wife and I got married, I worked really
hard doing house painting and staining so that we could save up enough money to
buy our first house. It was the
Victorian cottage I have spoke of in other posts that we renovated. I have also mentioned in other posts that the
neighborhood we lived in was just starting to gentrify so it was still a bit
shady sometimes because of the gangs who drew graffiti on garage doors at night,
and the guys who persistently drank in the alley.
The houses in our neighborhood were actually very nice and the
neighbors were either people who had lived there for over forty years, or were
people, like us, who just wanted a cool and affordable house to live in and
work on. When we first moved in we met a
couple of people our age on the block. There was Scott and his wife. He was an architect in the city, and also
owned the Village Tap, a place we liked to go to. There was also Richard, the
realtor that believed Roscoe Village
would be a hot place in the city some day, (and he was right). Other than that, we didn’t really know anyone
in the neighborhood for a long time. It’s
like that in the city sometimes, I think.
That all changed for a few reasons. The first reason was that my brother-in-law
and I tore the little front stoop off of the house and had a full front porch,
with a swing and everything, put on. People
would walk by and say “thank you” because they knew it was helping the value of
their homes. That’s when we first started gradually meeting people in our
neighborhood.
The second reason we started meeting people was that we had
a baby. There is nothing like a baby to
attract people to your house. After my
son was born all the moms and grandmas on the street came by to see and hold him
and revel in memories of what it was like to have babies of their own. Carol, the older woman who lived next door to
us, and never really ever talked to us, gave me a baby present one day over the
fence. I thanked her and as we talked,
she bragged about how she toilet-trained her twins when they were two. I
thought it was bluster, but I said, “Wow.
Did you really?” She replied in her thick accent, “I had to. We were
fleeing East Germany .
There was no way to do diapers.” I
talked to Carol a lot after that.
The third reason why we met out neighbors in the city was because
of the blackout. One night my wife and I went out to dinner, and left Ben with
his teenaged godfather, John. My wife
and I have always had two people from our family be the godparents of our
children and then selected a teen from our neighborhood church to also serve. We walked to a restaurant over on Irving
Park Road , had a nice meal, and walked back
home. When we got back into our
neighborhood we noticed there were no lights on in the businesses or houses. We started walking much faster and cutting
through alleys.
When we got home John was sitting on the porch swing with
Ben who was wailing. I asked, “What the
hell is going on?” John said, “My dad called and said the power is out all over
Lakeview.” It was a very hot summer that
year, hotter than we had had in a long time. I asked him, “Did he say how long
people think it is going to last?” Karen took Ben into the house to try to calm
him down. “No, the Addison
Street power station blew out.”
I sat down and ran my hands through my hair. I said, “Ok, I’ll just drive you home.” John looked at me and laughed. “You can’t. Your car is in the garage and you
don’t have any other kind of entrance than the main door. The opener won’t work.” He patted me on the
shoulder. “It’s alright, I’ll walk home.” As he left he said over his shoulder, “Oh, by
the way, the police stopped by. Your son
was crying so loudly, they thought I was maybe beating him. It’s all good though.” Suddenly a good night turned into a very bad
night.
I walked over and got a ton of ice from the local market and
we put things from the freezer into coolers so it might with some chance not spoil.
My wife and I slept with Ben on the fold-out couch in the living room because our
bedroom was way too hot. There was a
little breeze off the lake so it wasn’t too bad, but I remember getting up all
night, writing, and desperately hoping the power would come back on.
The power did not come on the next day, or the next, so I stayed
home from work. I told my wife that she
should have her father pick her and Ben up, because I was starting to get
concerned about the heat. She said, “No,
it’s not bad enough yet. We’ll be
Ok. It’ll be on soon. I am mostly concerned about the food. We can’t
keep buying ice.”
That night the heat did not really dissipate much. In fact it felt worse. There was a shady character
down the block who inherited a legacy house from his parents. I did not like him much because his young kid
once stole his truck, did a hit and run on my car, and then all he could come
up with to compensate me was an offer of “some really awesome cassette tapes.” During
the blackout I cut him a little slack when he took his portable generator around
the neighborhood and started helping people who really needed power the most. He
also took a big monkey wrench and opened all of the fire hydrants for awhile.
After he opened the hydrants people started coming out of
their houses. Toddlers, teenagers, and several adults all started playing in
the water. People went into their
backyards. They hauled lawn chairs and
grills out into the street. We started cooking
all the food in our coolers that would spoil if it was not cooked. We ate and drank beer late into the night. We
talked and laughed. We got to know each other as neighbors.
During that strange block party, I met a man who had the
house across the street from me, and owned the small red brick apartment building
on the corner. He was an older, retired
guy, a widower, who everyone on the street called “Thumbs.” It was an ironic nickname. When I shook his hand, I saw that he had no
thumbs, just a couple of stubs. I never
asked him how he lost them. He was a nice guy.
We talked about how the neighborhood was getting better. He offered to come over and help me with some
things I was doing on my house.
The very best part of that night was when some of the people
who populated the apartment building, members of the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra, borrowed some folding chairs from “Thumbs,” set them up in the
vacant lot across the alley from my house and played an impromptu concert. They
played Haydn; they played Mozart, and they played Vivaldi, because I asked them
to. It was beautiful.
When the night was over, the hydrants had been resealed, and
everything had been put back away, my wife, my baby and I went to bed on the
fold-put couch again. Sometime in the
morning we were awakened by strange sounds and lights. The power was back on
and we had air conditioning again. My
wife and I sighed and thanked God that it had not been worse and went back to
sleep.
In the weeks after the blackout, it seemed me that people
waved to each other a lot more, which was nice. I saw a lot more people talking in their front
yards and on the sidewalks than I did before.
People would stop by our porch to ask how we were doing with the new
baby or to offer help if we needed it.
I think one of my favorite memories of our time in Roscoe
Village is this. One day I came
home from work, not long after my second son was born. I found my wife, who at
the time was transitioning from being an executive to becoming a stay-at-home
mom, in the living room with all the young girls that lived on our street. They were playing a boom box and dancing the “Macarena.”
That made me smile and laugh. It made me
feel like we didn’t just live in a house; we lived in a neighborhood.
I liked that when we lived in the city we lived in a
neighborhood. I like that when we moved out into the suburbs we still live in a
neighborhood. People here help each
other; we watch over each other and our kids. We sit on driveways by fire pits and
socialize, we laugh a lot. We lend things to each other. We cook things for each
other when it is needed. We celebrate
together, and we mourn together. We welcome people when they move in, and miss
people when they leave. That is a
neighborhood.
Not everyone lives in a neighborhood. Some people live in what are just communities
of houses, go about their business, and never feel a sense of connection with
the people who live around them. I feel sad for them. I have lived in my current neighborhood for almost
seventeen years. I love it and all the people that live around me.
I think neighborhoods are something precious and that I
cherish very much. Everyone should be
lucky enough to live in real neighborhoods.
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