In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  “Who’s Tris?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anyone in the neighborhood with that name.

  Tris was a dog on his route, said Ralph, explaining that dog-owning customers supplied him with nearly all the treats he needed for the neighborhood dogs. He said he hadn’t had to buy a box of treats in more than a year. I was embarrassed. Daily, for years, Ralph had slipped my dog a treat but I’d always figured they were supplied by the Postal Service; I’d never given Ralph a box of treats.

  Ralph’s typical workday began at 7 a.m. with four hours of sorting at the post office followed by four and a half hours of deliveries. I wondered what he thought about while driving the route.

  “Much of the time,” he said, “I’m thinking about Vietnam vets and ways to recruit more members for our chapter.” Ralph chaired the local chapter’s membership committee. He also volunteered at the Veteran’s Administration hospital, where he ran Bingo games and, as he put it, “brought guys in wheelchairs down for concerts.”

  An experienced cook, Ralph also liked to think about new recipes. “I look at every cooking magazine that comes through the post office,” he said, naming Cooking Light and La Cucina Italiana as among his favorites. “In the back of magazines, they always have a recipe index. If something catches my eye, I put it aside, make a copy—I still deliver the magazine that day, of course.”

  A UPS truck passed us coming the other way. “There’s the competition,” I said. Ralph waved “hello” to the driver.

  Over the years, said Ralph, some customers, aware of his interest in cooking, have invited him into their homes to see their kitchens. “I’ve seen some spectacular houses,” he said, eyes wide. He recalled one kitchen with an eight- burner Viking stove. “Right now,” he said, “I’d love to be invited into the Gannett house.” Once the home of newspaper publisher Frank Gannett, the mansion recently had undergone two years’ of remodeling by its new owners, the incoming CEO of Bausch & Lomb Co. and his wife. Ralph said craftsmen working at the house had told him the new kitchen was fabulous.

  A few months earlier, I had had the pleasure of enjoying Ralph’s cooking. I’d asked him for an interview and he’d invited me to his home—a town house he’d recently rented in another suburb and shared with his twenty-year-old daughter. It was a Sunday afternoon. By the time we were done talking, it was nearly five o’clock and Ralph invited me to stay for dinner.

  Ralph’s kitchen measured six feet across, leaving just three feet of space to move around between the two counters. It wasn’t the kitchen of his dreams, said Ralph, but since he and his wife of thirty-two years recently had separated, it was, at that point, the best he could do. He emptied a box of rigatoni into an eight-quart cooking pot, which he described as a “fifteen-dollar Kmart special that included two chopping boards.” In a large pan, he stirred meatballs and sausage.

  A sleeveless undershirt showed a fine layer of dark hair on Ralph’s powerful arms and shoulders. Years of hauling mail evidently had helped keep him, at age fifty-eight, in good physical shape. A trim mustache and short, graying hair combed straight back added to a neat appearance.

  As he chopped celery for a salad, Ralph mentioned he’d spent four hours earlier that day at the VA hospital’s new hospice unit with an eighty-two-year-old veteran.

  “What do you do with the man for four hours?” I asked.

  “Whatever he wants to do, that’s what we do,” said Ralph. “If he wants to talk, we talk. If he wants to watch TV, we do that.”

  He said he also visited regularly with a former postal carrier who had retired because of a bad back and then developed diabetes, helping him pay bills and doing light improvements around his house.

  We ate in the living room on a card table covered with a green plastic cloth. On a wall nearby hung a poster of Lance Armstrong riding for the U.S. Postal Service in the Tour de France. “He’s my hero,” said Ralph, who often bicycles for exercise on the weekends.

  Throughout the meal, I couldn’t shake the irony of dining at my mailman’s home even though I’d never been invited into the homes of most of the people who live nearby me. I mentioned this to Ralph.

  “I wonder if the people in your neighborhood even know each other,” he commented. I said he probably knows the neighbors better than they know each other.

  “That’s certainly true,” he said. “It was made clear to me the first day on the job. My manager said, ‘Take a few minutes to talk to the people. You are the only connection for many of them to the neighborhood.’ These days, of course, everyone’s so concerned about efficiency, they tell us the opposite. ‘Hurry up and do the route—don’t stop to socialize.’ But I still do stop.”

  He recalled once seeing Grace Field, the woman who walked daily through the neighborhood, drop her purse as she got out of her car. “So I picked up the purse from the street and brought it to her,” he said. I asked if he’d talked to her much. “Not really,” he said. “I just exchange what I call pleasantries: ‘Nice day today,’ ‘Good day for walking,’ that sort of thing.”

  Ralph, in my opinion, was a top- notch mail carrier, but as on any route, once in a while, I would accidentally receive a neighbor’s mail. I was curious about that, and how the other neighbors handled it.

  “That’s a good question,” he said. “More than ninety percent of the time, customers would rather give misdirected mail back to me than walk it over to the person next door.”

  Anything odd about that? I asked

  “Well, growing up, if I got a piece of mail that wasn’t mine, I’d just run it over to the right house,” he said. Ralph grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Rochester. “Thing is,” he continued, “the more affluent people are, the more protective they are. They don’t want to get involved with their neighbors, and they don’t want to take mail over because it’s seen as an invasion of privacy both ways: you don’t want your mail seen, and you don’t want to let your neighbor know you’ve seen their mail. Also, they just don’t want to have to engage in a conversation that maybe they don’t want to have.”

  “Guilty as charged,” I thought. Many times when I’d received mail for neighbors, instead of taking it over, I’d given it back to Ralph. It would have felt awkward to show up at the home of someone I barely knew with a bank or stock statement. It’d be socially awkward, too, to meet someone in my neighborhood while, in effect, performing the duties of a mailman.

  So why, I asked Ralph, don’t neighbors want to know each other?

  “Look, at the time of the Depression,” he said, “your neighborhood was your life because you had no money to do other stuff. Now, there are so many other diversions, especially for the affluent. You got people who belong to two country clubs and are active in the community. There are events they’re expected to attend—it’s not even an option, it’s mandated: ‘You will be on the board, et cetera.’ Affluent people have so many obligations and so many different avenues for socializing that being part of a neighborhood just doesn’t happen.”

  I was impressed with Ralph’s insight; like Brian Kenyon, the newspaper carrier, he had a good read—thanks to years of close contact—on the neighborhood. And I was glad someone in my neighborhood subscribed to La Cucina Italiana, because Ralph’s rigatoni was delicious.

  LATER, it occurred to me that Ralph’s knowledge of his customers was, to some extent, a function of the kind of route he had: by delivering directly to our homes, he often had a chance to meet us at the door, face to face. If he’d had a different kind of route, say, an apartment building where he delivered to a bank of lobby mailboxes, he might see his customers only rarely.

  But that’s not to say affluent apartment building residents don’t have service people who get to know them intimately. They do. They’re called doormen.

  “[The doorman] has watched [his] tenants for years,” writes Peter Bearman, chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, and author of Doormen. “He knows their names. If they have kids, he has watched them grow. He knows when th
ey come home, what they do at night, the movies they watch, and what kinds of foods they eat. He knows if they drink. He knows when one of them is having an affair, is in trouble, and when one of their friends is in town. He likely knows their relatives by sight.”

  This knowledge grows out of the tasks most doormen perform daily. Typically, these include greeting tenants, getting taxis, coordinating workmen and handymen, screening visitors, logging in delivery of newspapers, mail and packages, dry cleaning, video rentals, and food.

  As a result, says Bearman, doormen “know a lot about their tenants: what they eat, what movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, work too much, play with their children, abuse their partner, have kinky sex, are generous or tight, friendly or sour. They infer much of their knowledge from both direct and indirect observation typically extending over many years.”

  In this sense, the typical doorman is likely to know far more about his tenants than even the most astute mail carrier knows about people on his route. Indeed, notes Bearman, doormen “know things about their tenants’ households” that even the tenants themselves don’t know. “Does the adolescent daughter have a boyfriend? If so, how often and for how long does he come over for a visit? Does he only arrive when no one is at home? Does the babysitter have visitors after the kids have gone to bed? Does the cleaning lady leave early? Does the husband come home in the middle of the day?”

  Some doormen even spend time—typically on the swing or night shifts—helping distraught or lonely tenants in ways that go beyond their job descriptions. Everything from personal problems to a phobic fear of mice can lead to long conversations in the middle of the night with the doorman, who is something of a captive audience, cast in the role of surrogate mate, friend, or therapist.

  Despite this level of service, asked whether they would like to live in a doorman building, many doormen say no. “They know just how much they know about their tenants,” writes Bearman. “[T]he idea that someone would know that much about them makes them uncomfortable.”

  AS I continued walking that fall day alongside Ralph’s mail truck, we came to the house of a neighbor whose husband recently had passed away. Before he delivered her small bundle of mail, Ralph put it inside a clear plastic bag. “Her mailbox is tiny, and on damp days like this, some of the mail can get wet from the rain,” he explained.

  As we approached Lou Guzzetta’s driveway, Ralph shared a story with me. “So one day I realize I’ve got in Dr. Guzzetta’s mail some pills from the VA,” he began, so I say to him, ‘Here’s your pills from the VA—I didn’t know you were a veteran.’ And he says, ‘I’m a wounded war hero, didn’t you know?’ I couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not. I didn’t know how to take it. Then he says, ‘Yeah, I got rheumatoid arthritis.’”

  I told Ralph what I knew of Lou’s experience during the Korean War, and that he did, in fact, have a war- related disability. “But Lou’s still in reasonably good health,” I added. “What he’d really like is to be more active, to have somebody to take care of.”

  “I should mention the VA volunteer program to him,” said Ralph. “They can always use good people over there.”

  But I knew Lou would never go for that. I remembered that what he wanted was a person to take care of, one on one, as he had cared for his friend who died of cancer.

  Lou wasn’t home when Ralph left his mail. It made me wonder if Ralph ever got concerned about some of the older people on his route, especially if he didn’t see them for a few days in a row.

  “If I have an elderly customer and the mail piles up for more than one day, I want to know why,” he said. “I try to find a relative or neighbor and find out what’s going on.”

  “I feel like I’m family to a lot of people,” said Ralph. “I’m happy when they get married. I’m sad when they pass on.”

  At my house, I asked Ralph to deliver the mail as he normally would. I wanted the experience of seeing my mail delivery from his point of view. So Ralph drove up my circular driveway as usual, got out, and pushed a stack of mail—a smaller stack than some of my neighbors received, I now noticed—through a slot in the side door. That turned out to be not so interesting. I’m not sure what insight I had expected.

  At Patti DiNitto’s house, Ralph left the mail in a box near the side door. He knew Patti had been ill. “I haven’t seen her in a while,” he told me, “but a couple of months ago she was out in front when I drove up. She was wearing a scarf that covered her hair and part of her face. I hardly recognized her.”

  Were there times, I wondered, other than checking on elderly residents, when Ralph had helped out some of the neighbors? Hesitantly at first, and then more rapidly as recollections came to mind, Ralph ticked off a list of things he had done over the years for my neighbors. He’d pushed people’s cars out of snow—manually pushed because it was against postal regulations to use the truck. He’d helped people carry groceries from their cars. He’d put newspapers and packages in people’s houses when they were away—mailed packages as well as those left by others—and in order to do that, several people had given him the secret codes to their alarm systems. He’d found six or seven lost dogs, lured them with treats into his truck, and driven them home. He’d found a woman locked out of her house because the key was stuck in the door so he disassembled the lock, greased it, and replaced it. He once saw a boy fall off his bike and drove to the parents’ house to tell them. He found an elderly woman with dementia locked out of her house so he went and got an eight-year-old boy who lived next door, boosted him up through an open window in the back of the house, and lowered him down so the boy could go in and open the front door. He handed the mail once to a woman in her late eighties and, while chatting with her, noticed he couldn’t understand a word the woman said. Recognizing the symptoms of a stroke, he called the woman’s daughter-in-law to alert her.

  Ralph’s recitation riveted me, and as he went on, I began to realize that in some ways he was a better neighbor to us than we were to each other.

  Unfortunately, my question had distracted Ralph so that when he finally drove up Deb and Dave O’Dell’s driveway and reached in the truck for what should have been their ample stack of mail, there was none. “Oh, my gosh,” he said, “I must have misdirected their mail.” We doubled back a couple of houses until, from the box near the side door of a house down the street, he recovered the O’Dells’ mail, and redelivered it. I wondered, though, had Ralph not caught his error that day, would the people in the other house have given the O’Dells their mail?

  10

  Connections

  ON a lovely day in early spring, as we walked around the block, Patti told me her doctors had found a small tumor in her head. The clinical trials in San Francisco had shown some increase in immune functions, she said, but it wasn’t significant. And she wasn’t supposed to drive anymore. The tumor, and medication she needed for it, carried a risk of seizures. Clearly, this was a major disappointment. There was no practical way to get around our suburb, or any of the surrounding suburbs, without a car.

  Patti seemed tired. Her face and eyelids were puffy. She wore a long brown wig; I hadn’t seen her in a wig before. We’d almost made it around the block when we came up to Lou Guzzetta’s house. He was in the front yard picking up small sticks and bits of paper. The weather report in that morning’s paper said we’d seen the last snows of winter, so I guessed he was doing an early spring cleanup.

  I was glad to see Lou outdoors as it gave me the chance I’d been waiting for to introduce him to Patti. A couple of times over the previous months, I’d mentioned Patti to Lou. I told him she was one of the other neighbors at whose house I’d slept over. I also told him she was divorced with two children, and that she was a radiologist who had diagnosed her own breast cancer. Lou said he had never seen her—despite her having lived five houses down from him on the same side of the street for more than five years. Neither had he heard about her being sick.

  I walked with
Patti halfway up Lou’s driveway. Lou stopped cleaning to come over and meet us. “This is our neighbor, Patti DiNitto,” I told him. “I think I mentioned to you Patti’s a radiologist.”

  “Well, I won’t tell you what I think of radiologists,” Lou said to Patti, “because I don’t know you well enough yet!”

  Patti seemed to take the cheeky comment good-naturedly.

  They chatted a bit—which hospital are you with? What kind of practice? Lou didn’t say anything about Patti’s health and Patti didn’t mention she was no longer working. Yet since they were both physicians, I’m sure Patti understood that Lou could tell by her gait and appearance that she was not well.

  That was the first time—the meeting of Patti and Lou on Lou’s driveway—that I had introduced two neighbors who previously had been strangers to each other. Clearly, Patti was going to need more help than any one person could offer, and as I thought about this, it occurred to me that the real measure of success of my whole effort would be if someone who previously did not know Patti—and sadly, that included everyone on the street—would join me in helping her out. If that could happen, well, then we would have a real community. And the most obvious pair of neighbors with whom to start, it seemed to me, were the two standing in front of me in Lou’s driveway. Lou and Patti didn’t know, but I knew—because of the time I’d spent with each of them—that both could find in the other something they needed. Lou needed someone to take care of, as he had cared for his wife and for friends in their last illnesses. And Patti needed taking care of.

  At my request, Lou took us through his open garage into the backyard so Patti could see his in-ground pool, which was still covered for the winter. As I expected, he invited Patti’s daughters to swim when the weather warmed up. “Come anytime,” he said to Patti. “My kids and even my grandchildren are too old and don’t use it. Last year I went in, what, three times?”