Where are the Road Signs for Becoming a Better Neighbor?
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to woo our neighbors. How to get them to like us. In specific, I’m working on the house across the street. The couple who lives there is about our age, maybe a little bit older. They seem cool—not totally out of our league, but he rock climbs and she’s bilingual, if that gives you an idea. Also, they have a son about the same age as our son. But they’ve lived here longer than we have. They don’t need us like we need them.
It’s tricky.
I want to be a good neighbor. I’m trying to get better. I used to be very good, then I turned pretty crummy, and now I’m trying to be good again.
When I was a kid, I was instant best friends with my neighbors. On our street in Manassas, I had Big Megan and Little Megan. Little Megan had a pool. Big Megan had guinea pigs. They were both younger than I was, but it still privately delighted me whenever they came over to ask if I could play. You never asked what they wanted to play. That wasn’t the point. They were my neighbors. We shared the same cul-de-sac. We just played.
Growing up, I was friendly with adult neighbors, too. It was always so easy to be. Most people want a few kids in their neighborhood. They want a reason to buy Halloween candy, to line the streets with paper-bag luminaries for Christmas. At the end of each workday,
I would wait for my dad to come home, and for Mr. Anthes, who lived across the street. The worst I ever did was steal rocks from a rock garden, and make Mrs. Anthes listen to my a cappella covers of Billy Joel songs, of which I had more than one.
Then, when I was 10 years old, we got a dog. The Anthes family moved away. He was a big dog. He didn’t walk well on a leash. The Antheses had been our best friends in the neighborhood, and while other people were nice, after they left it just wasn’t the same.
A dog can really shake up your relationship with your neighbors.
If they have a dog, you have to consider: Does your dog like other dogs? Ours didn’t. If they have a cat, does your dog like cats? Not ours.
I loved our dog very much and will forever defend him because he was well-meaning and loyal. But I lived in fear of walking him, which I was supposed to do every day after school. We always suspected his hearing and vision weren’t great, since every bicyclist, motor vehicle, other animal and pedestrian spun him into a fit of Old Testament fury. On my watch, our dog:
Repeatedly tried to consume a small white terrier, four houses down; Ambushed a different family’s cat, daily, until they asked me to start walking on the other side of the street; Urinated so frequently on one neighbor’s rosebushes that they yellowed and died; Shook his collar, more than one time, and ran directly into traffic, endangering drivers and jamming local traffic; and, Regularly lunged atop the woman two doors down, in her nightgown, until she confessed she was afraid to leave her house in the morning to pick up her newspaper.
We tried everything with that dog: obedience schools, pleading, various leashes and bribes. As he grew older, he settled a bit, though not a whole lot. After 15 years in the same house, the woman with the dead roses moved away, for reasons that probably weren’t related.
Other people moved, too. The neighborhood swung one way, not necessarily for the worse, then swung back. We would have long stretches of spring, into late summer, into fall, of kids outside playing flashlight tag; of a certain cat stalking the various lawns, calling outside the doors for food, connecting us in a zigzag pattern of its nightly progressive dinners. One year, deer started coming up from the creek that ran behind our street, and people gathered after work in clumps on the sidewalk to talk about seeing them. Other years it rained more, and everyone stayed in. Then I started noticing less.
As a young adult, you’re a bad neighbor. You almost have to be one, by definition. At that age, you’re not invested in your community; you’re invested in yourself. You leave school, or your parents’ house, taking apartments and inching in closer to the city. You care a lot about where you live because you think it says something about you and you’re very concerned at the moment about who that person is. You want your city or town to do something for you. The inverse relationship is a lower priority.
The neighbor unseen: a person only ever outside in their neighborhood in the time it takes to walk from the car to the front door. From the other side of that door, you never know who’s watching. Out on a walk during a recent visit with my parents, a woman called out to me from her driveway. I didn’t know her name, or her face. She lived one block away. She knew me, she said, from all those years walking my dog. She remembered me doing it when I was 10.
My sister, who is older than I am, lives in a neighborhood full of people who wake up every morning not believing their own luck. Their Connecticut suburb makes Mr. Rogers’ community look like the west end of Baltimore. As if whispering fairies deposited themselves on bedside pillows in the night, every beautiful person with two children, a dog, and an au pair seems to have one day woken up and known to move to there. The children have hair colors like “flaxen” and “chestnut.” The parents follow the speed limit and clean out their gutters. The dogs are all trained, and the au pairs organize a neighborhood-wide play group that meets every day in spontaneous celebration of living in residential Disneyland. When I was 23, I would visit and not understand any of it, then drive home to my Arlington apartment complex where I didn’t know a single other person and go back to work on Monday.
I don’t live like that now, on either end of the spectrum. I wonder, Am I a good neighbor? We don’t play loud music, but the yard’s in bad shape. I wave, but mostly from the car because I don’t know everyone’s name. We make bread for the holidays but then usually eat half of it and have to sneak around to the houses that we pick to get it that year.
Last year, we picked carefully. We weren’t fair about it, or arbitrary. That bread was baked with flour, sugar, and cunning. Because, you see, now I want a reason to buy Halloween candy and flashlights for tag. I want kids ringing our doorbell to see if our son can play.
So I don’t do it every day, but some days I try to be outside when I know the mom on the other side of the street gets home from work. For Christmas, we gave them the best loaf. My son and I take lots of walks, and I’ve started to wave.
We want a dog, but I think we’ll give it some more time. Some more bread. It’s good bread. People are always happy we make it. And there’s a house down the block with the most beautiful roses.
@CitySprawlNVMag is neighborly on Twitter.
(February 2015)