Right.
My next pick was a couple—he a stockbroker and she a homemaker—with two teenage children. I knew him to say hello to, but was unsure how to make the approach. Late one afternoon, I was walking Champ past his house just as he happened to pull into his driveway, and decided to speak to him right there. I briefly described what I had in mind and said, if he was interested, we could have lunch to discuss it further. With a grave look on his face, he came close to me, poked his cell phone at my chest, and said in a low, controlled voice, “I’m a very private person. In fact, you might say I am pathologically private. I wouldn’t ever want to see anything in print about me, my family, or my business.” I was wondering if I should take that as a no when, oddly, he said he’d be glad to have lunch. We set a date, but later he canceled. We rescheduled, and he canceled again. Then one morning he called and invited me to his house. He let me interview him for an hour about his personal background, which turned out to be fascinating. But a few weeks later, just before our next scheduled meeting, he called to say he couldn’t do it—he was just “too private a person.”
The third refusal came from a couple with four children who recently had emigrated from Eastern Europe. When I visited at their home to talk, they served tea and homemade pastries. The mother and father each had a compelling personal story, but they ultimately declined to participate. Exposure of their family backgrounds, they said, might jeopardize relatives left behind.
So my success rate with the neighbors had dropped quite low (two yeses and four nos, including the one neighbor before Lou who turned me down). But then I thought of Jamie Columbus.
I knew Jamie, at least a little. In fact, if there was one person on my street whom most people knew—or at least knew of—it was Jamie Columbus. She, along with her mother, was among the most active real estate agents in town, and her specialty was buying and selling homes in the Houston Barnard neighborhood. In fact, after Renan Wills’s murder, Jamie handled the sale of the house. “I knew the people who lived in that house before the Willses,” she told me later, “so when I offered it for sale, I could talk about other families who had lived and prospered there. It wasn’t just ‘the murder house.’ ” In addition, Jamie and her parents both lived in the neighborhood: her parents on Ambassador Drive and Jamie, with her husband and two young children, on Sandringham. At that time, Jamie was also president of the neighborhood association. Why I hadn’t thought of approaching her sooner, I’m not sure.
When I called, she quickly agreed to let me interview her. I didn’t get a chance to talk directly with her husband; a venture capitalist, he was often out of town scouting new business deals. But Jamie assured me he’d have no objection. I didn’t mention sleeping over right away; those turndowns had made me even more cautious, and I figured I’d get to know Jamie better before popping that question.
Jamie’s roots in the neighborhood were deep. Her parents moved to Houston Barnard when she was seventeen, so she had lived her last year of high school here. She even married here. “I love the neighborhood and I love the land here,” she said later, explaining why she set her wedding at a friend’s stately home in Houston Barnard. “My friend had an absolutely beautiful yard!” she said. She especially appreciated the visual elements that unified the neighborhood aesthetically: slate roofs; iron fences; traditional, harp-shaped streetlamps; and homes, driveways, and walkways of stone or brick. Her wedding ceremony was held precisely at 12:34 and 56 seconds p.m. on July 8, 1990, or—just as she’d planned—at “1234567890.”
Set on the same side of Sandringham as me and about ten houses down, Jamie Columbus’s own large and impressive home was in what is called the Cotswold Cottage style. Sometimes these homes are referred to as “storybook” houses because they look so much like traditional country houses often pictured in English children’s books. Modern versions became popular in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s; Jamie’s house was built in 1926. Faced with stucco and half-timbering, the house had several gables, and a steep, slate roof meant to mimic the look of thatch. In the back was a large yard with a perennial English garden and an in-ground pool. Inside, Jamie’s home was filled with colors, textures, and shapes. The dining room had a ruby-colored ceiling and a chandelier made of old copper plumbing fixtures, the breakfast room was blue, a small sitting room was green. Everywhere hung paintings, photographs in handmade frames, and what Jamie later described as “treasures from around the world”: Asian lanterns, musical instruments, and a young Indian girl’s dress. The TV cabinet was an ice box; there was an old church pew; furniture, including distressed farm pieces, was hand-painted.
Jamie, forty, was of medium build with dark blond hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders. On that first visit, she wore vibrant colors and jewelry from Africa and India that made her almost appear to sparkle.
She showed me into the living room, where her daughter, Lily, three—with blondish-brown curls like her mother—sat at a child’s table coloring on paper with pencils and marker. Her brother, Max, five, was at a Montessori school. Jamie’s husband was at work.
“Lily and I are coproducing a book!” Jamie exclaimed. Jamie had a clear, soprano voice and often spoke in excited outbursts. “We’re making portraits of the First Ladies. Each First Lady gets her own page and write-up. A whole book of them! Right now, we’re on Coolidge.”
Excusing herself to take a phone call, Jamie went to her study. Later, she told me the call was for a new business she and her mother were starting called “On the House,” a real estate benefits program for corporations to offer their employees.
Jamie invited me to the kitchen, where she had already made us tea. She’d made cookies and prepared a fruit plate. If I slept over, I thought, breakfast was likely to be very good.
I commented on the art everywhere. Jamie acknowledged that most of the paintings—oil pastels—and color photographs were her own. She had traveled to more than thirty- six countries, she explained, in Central and South America, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Her purpose was to study, photograph, and paint “indigenous tribal women, how they live and the work they do.” This was a different side of my neighbor than most people knew. To most town residents, Jamie Columbus was the Harvard Business School graduate who had come back to work at her mother’s real estate firm—she’d had her own real estate license since she was eighteen. She was the face and name on countless FOR SALE signs in some of the more upscale neighborhoods in town—including ours.
But Jamie, I saw, was also an artist, someone who had graduated college with a double major in philosophy and psychology, had lived in New York City and kept her own painting studio, and who, in her free time, still loved to travel, photograph, and paint.
“I love the incredible beauty and color of women wearing traditional clothing,” she continued, talking of her travels, “of seeing them harvesting, working in the fields, and in the markets.”
Before they had children, Jamie and her husband took a trip around the world, visiting and helping support humanitarian projects. In one African village, Jamie saw “a mother, grandmother, and a man and all his wives living in huts right next to each other,” she said. “In many cultures, your family is also your neighborhood.
“I’m lucky,” she continued, “that Max and Lily’s grandparents live so close. That’s why I moved back to Rochester and to the neighborhood. We could get to their house just by running through several yards.”
After our snack, Jamie offered to show me her studio on the third floor. I followed her up the stairs, which were made of walnut and had a runner made of sea grass and a border made of sewn pieces of Guatemalan tribal shirts.
In her studio were many paintings in progress; around the perimeter of the floor, photos leaned against the wall. Most of the photos, just as Jamie had described them, showed women and girls in their native environment. Almost always, women were pictured working: selling things in the market, carrying water, gathering food. They wore colorfu
l robes, saris, or aprons, depending on location. Jamie had collected many of her photos into a book she called Earth Tones Woman. Just then, she explained, she was working to find a publisher.
One thing in particular intrigued me about Jamie’s paintings: many of the women’s faces were blank—they had no features at all. I asked about this.
“I have a strong feeling of the collective unconscious of women around the world,” she said, “so in my paintings, it’s more, ‘Here are the women’ versus ‘Here is a woman with a particular face.’ Look,” she continued, “at Harvard Business School, women did not always work together, but in these other countries, women work together. It’s women as a group that interests me, and what I found so beautiful about women working together is the community they form.”
This prompted me to ask Jamie about the native villages themselves as communities. From her travels, I wondered, had she learned anything about how these villages are structured to form community?
“Can I borrow your notepad?” she asked, and then drew in pencil on a blank page.
“This is how a typical village is structured,” she said, showing me the pad. She had drawn two concentric circles with little squares surrounding the inner one and lines radiating out from the center to each of the squares. Pointing to the little squares, she said, “These are the huts. They’re all built around a point in the middle. It’s like a lotus with petals radiating out.”
Her drawing did, in fact, resemble the inside of a flower.
“Successful communities—‘tribal neighborhoods,’ if you want to think of it that way—ideally are built around a central space,” she said. “It can be dirt, or mud, or green space. But it’s central and it’s where they gather.”
Then Jamie drew a second sketch below the first. This one showed a heavy, horizontal line with two large boxes above it and two below. Inside each box was a smaller one. “This is how a typical American neighborhood is laid out,” she said. The horizontal line was a street; the large boxes were lots, and the smaller boxes inside the lots were houses. “You see, people are contained within their own spaces—you don’t even have to see the people closest around you—and there’s no center.
“And there’s another difference, too,” she continued. “In other cultures, people live outside more. There’s nothing to do in your house, so there’s far fewer secrets. Here, ninety- nine percent of your day you’re behind closed doors—especially in a climate like ours. And you’re hidden behind three layers of protection: a front door, an alarm system, and you have thousands of square feet to spend time in.
“Traditionally, individual survival was not possible; you were dependent on others in your village for support. But in Western culture we think we can survive alone. Here you can go days or weeks, or literally years, without seeing the people in the house right next door.
“So the neighborhood”—and here I understood Jamie was speaking of our neighborhood—“may be unified by the consistency of building materials, but it certainly isn’t unified in terms of the people who live here. This community is an archipelago; at times it feels as though everyone is on their own half- acre island.”
Jamie’s cell phone rang, and after taking the call—evidently from a real estate client—she ran down to her study to send another fax. It seemed a good time for me to leave, but we agreed to meet again soon.
AT the agreed-upon time at Starbucks, a week or two later, I waited for Jamie. It was a chilly afternoon, and I warmed myself with a cup of tea. As the minutes passed with no sign of her, I began to worry that she’d changed her mind about meeting with me. After twenty minutes, I called Jamie at home but there was no answer, and I didn’t have her cell number. After half an hour, I began calculating how long I should stay before I could safely assume she wasn’t going to show.
And then Jamie swooshed in, her silver earrings dangling under a Peruvian cap with ear flaps. She looked tired. After making apologies for being late—I’m not sure I really caught what had held her up—she got some tea and we resumed our earlier conversation.
I’d been thinking more about Jamie’s description of the structure of native villages and how, in her view, it promotes community. But this was an American suburb and we weren’t suddenly going to uproot our houses and reposition them around a central fire circle, so what, if anything, could actually be done, in her opinion, to improve a neighborhood like Houston Barnard?
“Our neighborhood needs certain things,” she said, sipping her tea. “It needs a moms’ group—some way for mothers with young children to get together. Where I lived growing up, we’d walk out of the house and there’d be moms and kids around. Here, if people go out, they go into their backyards. Not only aren’t there front porches—they’re against code—but you don’t even see people if you look into their houses because the rooms on the front are usually the living and dining rooms, which usually are unused.”
Speaking of “not seeing people,” I wondered if she had ever seen Lou Guzzetta. Jamie asked if Lou was “that gray-haired man I’ve seen out walking.”
So what would it take, I asked again, to redesign the neighborhood so people could actually see and know each other?
“Well, first I’d create a centralized park for families to gather.” Though tired, Jamie’s enthusiasm was building and we began speculating on which houses in the neighborhood with side lots—there were a handful—could sell their lots to the neighborhood association for a common park. “Of course, it would cost a half- million dollars for the lot,” she noted, “and many neighbors haven’t even joined the association, which is a twenty-dollar fee.”
What else besides common space?
“I’d have some kind of official welcoming committee. And we need more neighborhood gatherings. In the park area there could be an artistic kind of bench or other seating for families and children to have a picnic or play a game.
“Look,” she continued, “right now there’s no forum for even discussing ideas about neighborhood beyond the instinctual one of protecting one’s property and privacy. People’s feeling is: they bought their houses; they didn’t buy a percentage of the community.”
Did Jamie feel that, as neighbors, we have an obligation to know each other to help prevent a tragedy like what happened to the Willses?
“Well, yes and no,” she said. “There is an obligation to get involved if you see something wrong or spooky, but no, I don’t believe there’s any obligation to inquire.”
Jamie then recalled how she’d learned of the shootings. “Someone called me and said there was a murder-suicide on Sandringham. Honestly, I didn’t even know what a ‘murdersuicide’ was. Then when I found it was the Willses, I felt terrible. I wanted to do whatever I could to help, so I organized food delivery for the family.”
She said soon after the shootings she had suggested a neighborhood meeting—she wasn’t association president yet—but was told it would be inappropriate, so nothing happened.
“I had tried to get to know Renan when they first moved in,” Jamie reflected, “but it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t find her Chi.”
“Her Chi?”
“Her essence—in Buddhist philosophy, the center of her being,” explained Jamie. “Renan was a tragedy. I wish we could have helped her.”
Getting back to how to improve the neighborhood, Jamie had some more suggestions.
“We need to embrace people young and old, and from different ethnicities. We need some expression of a neighborhood—the American way would be to say ‘team spirit’ with neighborhood T-shirts or something. Houston Barnard T-shirts—right! And activities, like ‘Houston Barnard goes to the YWCA to help women there.’
“It’s so people don’t live in a neighborhood that is made up just of homes, but is made of people in those homes that do things together. Here, for example, people spend Christmas at home with just family, but other places in the world people celebrate together, as a group. They make opportunities for celebration: new moon, holidays, eve
n in the poorest of poor places, they find ways to come together. They have feasts.”
I was curious how Jamie would respond to a point I’d made earlier when talking with Orhan Beckman, the psychologist and brother of Renan Wills: that public space in American has increasingly become privatized.
“You know,” I said, “it seems more and more that where we can run into other people isn’t a park or the village green, but a private, commercial space like the supermarket, or Barnes and Noble, or right here in Starbucks.”
Jamie agreed. “Yes, but in those places you’re not meeting people daily like you would in the village square, but randomly. If I see you at the supermarket, it’s maybe once a month, and where am I going with that? What am I gonna say, ‘Hi, how’s your fruit?’ It’s pleasant, but it’s superficial. In traditional villages, especially when I slept over, I’d see people regularly, every morning for example, washing their saris in the river.”
“You slept in the villages?” I asked.
“Yeah, sometimes. Didn’t I mention that? In some of these villages, I stayed overnight.”
“So you actually slept over, like in a hut?”
“Yeah, sometimes in a hut.”
She named villages in Peru and Kenya, one near Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, Chang Mai in Thailand, and one in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
“And why’d you do that?”
“Because I find that with sleeping over, it’s more meaningful,” she said. “You get involved in people’s lives more. You bond with people and learn about their families.”
If I had had any doubts that she’d say yes about the sleepover, I now had none. If Jamie herself had experienced the bonding of sleeping over, surely she’d agree that I could do the same at her house.
“So what was it like?” I asked. “The sleeping over?”
“Well, to be honest, it can be uncomfortable,” she said. “Usually, I’d sleep on a hard surface. There were the sounds of dogs in the night—you really didn’t want to go out to the bathroom, you know? It could be a very long night, and then in the early morning there’d be roosters crowing. But the emotional and spiritual experience transcended the hardship.”
In The Neighborhood Page 11