In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  She began to cry again.

  “I feel like I let everyone down,” she said. “Medicine just requires so much time and energy. I lived a crazy life trying to do it all. Now everything I worked so hard for is gone. Maybe it would have been better if I’d been an accountant like my father wanted. Just live a status quo life, under the radar. Just do my job and do it well. Maybe I’d have led a better life.”

  I reminded her of an earlier comment she’d made, about never having rebelled as a teenager. “But you know, in a way you did,” I said. “You were the first in your family to go to college, you became a physician, you entered a cutting-edge field of medicine, then bought a big house in a beautiful but stuffy neighborhood . . .”

  Patti laughed. “It is stuffy,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just liked the house, and the street is so pretty.”

  There was something else I was curious about. The previous night, when she had cried briefly at Applebee’s, she mentioned that maybe it was “for all the crying she hadn’t done in college and med school.” I wondered what she had meant by that. What crying hadn’t she done?

  “My father had died,” she began, between bites of salad. “Everything seemed blunted after that. And then things got really hard in med school. I just shut it all out. I was afraid to cry in front of all these guys who are doctors. I didn’t think they wanted women to show emotion so I just don’t remember crying much. A lot of kids there were kids of doctors—they had someone with experience at home to bounce ideas off of. I had nobody. Now, looking back, it doesn’t make any difference. I feel I’m more self-assured. I think I have had experiences that have strengthened me.”

  “You mean experiences like with men?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “With men, work, health, divorce.”

  She stopped to take another bite of salad.

  “But if I had the choice,” she continued, “between all those strengthening experiences or a life of luxury, I’d take the life of luxury.”

  The check came. I said I’d pay, but Patti had already opened her purse and insisted on paying. Slowly, we made our way back through the mall, across the parking lot, and to her car. Patti was tired, and we didn’t talk much, but I was thinking about Renan, and I was thinking about Patti, and I was thinking that, as neighbors, we might have a chance to do things better this time.

  7

  Motion Sickness

  AT 3:45 a.m., I chewed a motion sickness tablet and went outside my house to wait. It was 20 degrees. Sandringham Road was quiet: no cars or people, just frost-covered lawns lit by streetlamps. I paced the driveway to keep warm. At 4:15, my cell phone rang.

  “I slept through my alarm!” It was Brian Kenyon, the man who delivered our newspapers. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  With a slight feeling of bravado—I’d managed to get up earlier than my newspaper carrier—I went inside to wait. Then a troubling thought occurred: Brian had warned me to take Dramamine because, as he put it, “The last three people who rode with me barfed,” but if he were getting a late start, wouldn’t he drive the route even faster?

  His van sped into my driveway and I jumped in. “I took the Dramamine,” I told him.

  “You could consider that a smart move,” he said, “especially as now we’re really going to be hauling.”

  I had never met Brian—didn’t even know his name until a few days earlier. All I knew was that early each morning, as my neighbors and I slept, he delivered our papers. Every day, he was the first person who came to our homes; by the nature of his work, he didn’t have much direct contact with us, but I wondered, nevertheless, what his perceptions were of the neighborhood. I decided I’d like to ride the route with Brian, to see Sandringham Road from his perspective. When I called to ask if I could do that, he was both gracious and enthusiastic, and readily agreed.

  Our first stop that morning was the distribution center where carriers came to pick up the papers. A dozen vehicles, mostly pickups and vans, were parked there, many with their engines running. Most of the drivers were men in their twenties and thirties; Brian was thirty-four. They all seemed to know each other. Through open windows, they yelled greetings and good-natured insults.

  “Hey, watch it!” Brian shouted back. “I’ve got a customer with me. I’m getting some respect.”

  I waited in the van while he went to get the papers.

  Brian was powerfully built: 6 feet tall, 230 pounds, with a thick neck and brawny arms. That morning, he wore a black ski cap pulled low over his short, blond hair. His boot laces were untied, evidence of how fast he’d left his house that morning after oversleeping.

  The local paper, the Democrat and Chronicle, came in bundles of fifty. There were also loose copies of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Barron’s, and color inserts for Don Pablo’s, a low-cost Mexican restaurant chain. “Like a lot of my customers on Sandringham are just waiting to eat at Don Pablo’s,” Brian joked. We spent fifteen minutes stuffing the papers into blue plastic bags so they’d stay dry regardless of the weather. (I’d always valued these blue bags—not only did they serve their intended purpose, but they were also handy for picking up after my dog.)

  We bagged different combinations: the Democrat alone, Democrat and Journal, Democrat and USA Today. When the last paper was bagged, Brian declared, “We’re out of here!” and sped out of the parking lot backward. A bracelet that said “I Love You Dad” swung wildly from the rearview mirror, and I felt the first tinge of nausea.

  It had been about a year since Brian took over the Houston Barnard route. His typical day, he told me, ran like this: Get up at 3:45, deliver papers for an hour and a half, return home for another hour’s sleep, get up again at 7:30; wake the three kids and, with his wife, get them off to school; go to his day job as a sales rep for an industrial products firm while his wife works part-time at a Hallmark store. At night, be back in bed between 8:30 and 11, depending on how tiring the day had been.

  The newspaper company hired Brian as an independent contractor; money for the papers, gas, even the blue bags, came out of his own pocket. The bags, he told me, cost a quarter of a cent apiece. Including year-end tips, Brian said he cleared about $800 a month. At Christmas, most customers tipped around $25, but a few gave $100. The route took Brian about 12 hours a week, so—as I calculated—for getting up every day at 3:45 a.m., he made about $17 an hour.

  “If I didn’t need the money and I could quit, I would,” he told me. “I’d like to get a normal night’s sleep.”

  THE Democrat and Chronicle, the local paper that Brian and I were delivering that morning, had for many years been the flag-ship paper of Gannett Co., one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains. That was because the company was based in Rochester where its founder, Frank E. Gannett, lived. In fact, Frank Gannett lived on Sandringham Road, across the street from me and just five houses down. His home, a 9,000-square-foot Tudor Revival set on two and a half acres, had eighteen rooms, English gardens, and a pool. I never met Frank Gannett—he died in 1957, the same year my family originally moved to Sandringham—but Lou Guzzetta did. “He’d walk around the neighborhood,” recalled Lou, “and talk to you, and pat children on the head.” Gannett’s ambitions reached beyond journalism: in 1940 he sought the Republican nomination for president and received 34 votes on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention. After his death, his widow, Caroline Gannett, continued to live in the house. Every December she’d have spotlights trained on the roof to showcase a life- size plastic Santa climbing down the chimney.

  Back when newspapers were delivered by boys and girls on bikes rather than adults in cars, I filled in a few times for a friend who had the morning route in our neighborhood. I stopped my bike at nearly every house on Sandringham—including the Gannett house—to deliver the paper. I remember wondering what the insides of all those houses looked like, and what the people in them were doing.

  Caroline Gannett died in 1979. Ownership of the house has
turned over two or three times since then, but among some neighbors it’s still referred to as “the Gannett house.”

  BRIAN Kenyon’s first stop on his route that morning was the Country Club of Rochester. That was the club where I’d watched Deb O’Dell play paddle tennis. With his left hand, Brian tossed three papers out the window. The blue bags skidded over the snow and came to rest within inches of the front door of the clubhouse. “I throw football and baseball right-handed, but my finesse arm is my left,” he said.

  At a house down the street, he threw left-handed over the top of the van for another bull’s-eye.

  Customers appreciated his reliability, and probably also his aim. Recently, he told me, he’d received a postcard from one that said, “Please don’t ever go on vacation again.”

  Brian was raised in a small town in western Massachusetts on a suburban cul-de-sac with seven houses. “Best place in America to grow up,” he said. “My parents had the neighborhood pool. Every summer evening, everyone got together chatting, sharing coffee, the kids playing. That’s what I wanted for my kids—but I don’t have it.”

  For more than a decade, Brian had lived on a busy street in the suburb of East Rochester. “Besides the traffic,” he said, “there aren’t many families with children. Also, there’ve been issues with some of the neighbors.”

  What issues? I asked him.

  “Just people not being respectful of each other,” he said. “I finally decided, ‘We can’t live in this neighborhood’—so we don’t. We live in the house, but we find our community elsewhere, in church and at friends’ houses.”

  When I thought about it later, Brian’s solution to his neighborhood problem seemed simple enough: he just dismissed the neighborhood as nonexistent and made his social connections elsewhere. It’s an attitude I had heard from others, too. I guessed that worked well enough for Brian, since between his newspaper route and full- time sales job, he wasn’t home much. But I wondered if that approach was as satisfying for his wife, who worked outside the house only part-time, or for his children.

  On a street adjacent to Sandringham, Brian backed out of one driveway, crossed the street at an angle, backed into the next driveway, and then reversed the process. He avoided shifting gears as much as possible because it was “less abuse on the transmission.” Maybe so, but—despite the Dramamine—I was growing increasingly nauseous. Then the van suddenly slid off the side of a driveway. As we headed into a gully, Brian yelled, “Oh, shit!” He steered expertly around two trees but there was a moment of fear—for me, certainly, and I think also for him—when it seemed the van might roll over. Brian kept his head, though. He drove through a backyard and out onto the other side of the street.

  “That was a very cool move,” I said, relieved.

  “We’re running so late,” he said, “I can’t stop to reflect on how cool that move was.”

  At 5:18 we reached the southern end of Sandringham. Brian stopped momentarily to check the route list. “It’s hard to remember who’s on and off vacation,” he said. Fifteen or twenty of his customers are away at any one time, he estimated. “They take a lot of vacations,” he said. “Many spend the winter in Florida.”

  As he scanned the list of addresses, I recalled a conversation with Brian just two days earlier. We’d met for lunch at a restaurant not far from Sandringham, and just after we’d sat down, Patti DiNitto walked in. She looked well that day and was by herself.

  “Here comes one of your other customers right now,” I said to Brian as Patti approached our table. I asked if he’d like me to introduce him, to “put a face with a name.”

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t even put a name with an address. All I know are the addresses. I wouldn’t recognize anyone’s name on your street. Now if you introduced her as ‘75 Sandringham’—that’s an address where the people had a stop on their paper for the last two weeks—I’d say, ‘Welcome back. Did you have a good vacation?’ ”

  “Well, this is 322 Sandringham and she is, in fact, just back from a nice vacation,” I joked to Brian, and then introduced him to Patti by name. She told us the trip to Arizona had worked out well; her daughter Caitlin’s leg had only been sprained and had healed enough for her to enjoy most of the outdoor activities on the trip.

  I didn’t mention Patti’s illness to Brian.

  In the van, when he had finished noting who was out of town, Brian turned to me.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  He had told me earlier that on a normal day, depending on road conditions, delivering papers to all thirty-six houses on Sandringham took on average just six minutes. That would be six houses a minute or one every ten seconds. I felt sick enough already but was determined to stick it out at least to the end of the street.

  “Ready,” I said.

  THE last time our neighborhood was prominently featured in the Democrat and Chronicle was on the occasion of the murder of Renan Wills. The paper played the story big: front page headline, A MARRIAGE ENDS IN VIOLENCE; photo of the Willses’ house; photo of Bob Wills; photo of Renan Wills; map of Brighton showing the location of Sandringham Road.

  That’s about the most attention our neighborhood ever received. On occasion, there have been other pieces: a doctor discusses a new medical study, a business executive comments on his company’s earnings report. But though the paper might write about people in the neighborhood, it never could do much to promote a sense of neighborhood. For one thing, as a publication covering all of Rochester, it was too diverse to examine closely what might be going on in any single neighborhood, let alone on any one street. Moreover, by its nature, the paper offered only one-way communication: editors and reporters talking to readers, not readers talking to each other (exceptions being Letters to the Editor and guest essays). In short, the paper Brian and I were delivering that morning was largely irrelevant to the question of how residents of a neighborhood connect or don’t connect to each other.

  The Internet, however, held real promise.

  From its earliest days, sociologists and social psychologists debated whether the Internet might strengthen or weaken neighborhood relationships. In early studies, they wired parts of neighborhoods for Internet access—leaving other parts unwired—then tried to compare over time the relative strength of contacts between residents who had access to each other and those who did not. Results were mixed. Now, after decades of experience, the answer still remains unclear, or perhaps the answer is Yes: the Internet can strengthen relations among neighbors and it can weaken relations; it all depends on how it’s used.

  On the “weaken” side, the concern has always been that, because there are only so many hours in a day, time spent on the Internet with distant, online friends will necessarily reduce time spent in real, face-to-face relations. A poignant example was offered by a woman in Tennessee who wrote me: “My late husband became a member of a couple of online communities a few years ago. They gradually became his circle of friends. He isolated himself from real-time friends and neighbors because he had friends online. So far, okay. But, he had a heart attack, then another, and where was his community? Nowhere, everywhere, but not here. Not where they could offer any support or help. I was not even able to find how to access the groups to let them know he died.”

  Similarly, a woman in Texas wrote: “The reason that proximity should be a reason for acquaintance is that the person in California you’re online with is not going to pick your child up from soccer or baby sit while you’re in chemo.”

  On the other hand, the Internet can enhance neighbor-to-neighbor communication in a way that no other media—including the daily newspaper—can. Already, thanks to some early innovators, thousands of people across the country use online services designed to help neighbors connect.

  Jared Nissim, thirty-five, was raised in Westchester, New York. As a child, he lived for a while on an Israeli kibbutz and found he liked the sense there of a close community. Later, back in Manhattan and living in an apartment, he felt i
solated. “I wanted to meet the other people who lived in my building,” he recalled. “I was tired of passing them in the hallway, only to exchange a nod but never actually getting to know them.”

  Nissim slipped a note under everyone’s door. “Hi, my name is Jared, in #100,” it said, and then asked for their e- mails and said he’d “organize something.” More than half responded positively. “I had a hunch that turned out to be true,” he recalled. “Most of the people who lived in my building wanted to meet each other—they just needed a good opportunity and reason to do so.” What Nissim eventually “organized” was MeetTheNeigh bors.org.

  Meet the Neighbors serves all kinds of neighborhoods, but as suggested by its welcome page—which resembles a multi-story building—it’s mostly aimed at apartment dwellers in big cities. “Our whole point is to connect people who are already physically next to each other,” Nissim told me. “People in apartment buildings can go years without getting to know even the people on the other side of the wall.”

  The phenomenon is well known. One young man wrote me: “I live in a 23-floor building in Manhattan and, incredibly enough, I don’t know the first name of one single one of my neighbors. Maybe this is my mistake adapting to the surroundings, instead of trying to do things the way I learnt growing up in another country where knowing your neighbors is part of daily life.”

  Residents of a building who register with Meet the Neighbors can communicate through a message board, post information about neighborhood services and events, and vote on building-wide issues. They can also send private messages to each other, if they both choose.

  By 2009, more than 2,500 buildings and nearly 14,000 residents had registered.