One day, before the family had arranged for full-time home health aides, Patti’s mother called me to ask if I could come over and stay with Patti for an hour or two while she and Joe did errands. When I arrived, Patti was sleeping so I just sat in a rocking chair beside her bed. The house was still. I thought how strange: here I am, the only person watching over a neighbor who only recently I hadn’t even known, and likely never would have known but for the deliberate decision to meet her. If I hadn’t done that, Patti would still be lying in this hospital bed in her dining room, but I would be three houses away and know nothing of it.
I saw Patti only a couple of times after that. Then on Thanksgiving night in 2005, while driving back to my house, I saw a police car in her driveway. The officer wouldn’t say why he was there, so the next morning I called Joe to ask if everything was okay. That’s when he told me, “Patti passed away last night.”
Immediately, I called Lou.
“It’s a blessing,” he said. “It had to be.”
The next day, Patti’s sisters from out of town and other relatives began gathering at her house. Lou and I decided to send some food to them. I was at the supermarket having an Italian Deli Platter made up when Lou called me. “You want to make it a little special?” he asked. “Buy one long-stemmed red rose and have them tape it to the top of the container.”
Later, when I called to ask if he was going to the funeral, Lou said no—his back hurt too much and, besides, it would be too sad. But early on Sunday morning, the day of the funeral, Lou called me.
“I’ll pick you up at ten thirty,” he said. “We’ll go together.”
The funeral mass was held at a Catholic church in a neighboring suburb. All the family members, including daughters Caitlin and Sarah, wore pink breast cancer ribbons on their blouses and jackets. A family friend spoke of the “courage, dedication, and discipline” it had taken for Patti to become a physician. “There was a steel, a fire in her that we shouldn’t forget,” he said. He closed with a prayer for Patti’s daughters, whom he called her “greatest accomplishment.”
“It’s a hard day for these two,” he said. “They have to let go of their mother.”
Patti’s white casket was wheeled out of the church toward a waiting white hearse as they played a recording of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.” After the formal rituals of the funeral mass, this song, sung in the first person as if Patti herself were asking the question, hit me hard. I hadn’t cried during the service, but I left the church in tears.
In a steady rain, Lou and I walked across the parking lot to his car.
“I never thought to ask,” said Lou. “How did you meet Patti?”
I don’t recall exactly what I answered Lou, but the truth is, I met Patti deliberately. I met her because it troubled me to think that one night, my neighbor Renan Wills feared for her safety and the safety of her children, but knew none of her neighbors well enough to seek shelter in our homes. I met Patti because later, I, myself, came to feel isolated among those same neighbors. I met Patti because at some point it seemed both absurd and wasteful to be living unconnected to the people all around me.
“Well, thank you for letting me get to know her, too,” Lou said as we got back into his car at the church. “She was a marvelous woman.”
FOLLOWING Patti’s death, I kept in touch with the various people I’d met from the neighborhood.
One spring day, I walked with Ertem Beckman, Renan Wills’s mother, through Rochester’s Highland Park. I wanted to see a tree that had been planted there in Renan’s memory. Ertem pointed to a twenty-foot-tall ruby horse chestnut tree. When Renan was little, she explained, a horse chestnut tree grew near Renan’s grandparents’ home in Point Chautauqua, New York, and it was her favorite. A silver tag around the tree’s thin but sturdy trunk read, “In memory of Renan Beckman Wills, MD, beloved daughter, devoted mother, February 26, 1955-February 29, 2000.”
The Willses’ two children, Emily and Peter, were both attending college and doing well, Ertem told me. And her son, Orhan, the industrial psychologist, recently had moved to Rochester with his family—including his young daughter, Renan—so Ertem and her husband had decided to remain in town.
The last time I saw Grace Field, she was walking, but not in my neighborhood. After another fall, she’d become frail and was using a walker, out for some afternoon exercise in front of her own apartment building, attended by an aide. But Grace still expressed a strong spirit and pleasure in being up and outdoors. In January 2009, Grace died at the age of ninety-four.
Ayesha Mayadas, Renan Wills’s best friend, continued her work as a jeweler. However, she and her husband, Bill Kenny, separated, and Ayesha moved near New York City, where she had family and to expand her business. Jean DeHaven and Sandra Arrington, and their husbands—neighbors who had lived on either side of the Willses—both decided at about the same time to downsize. They stayed in the Rochester area but sold their houses on Sandringham and moved to smaller homes.
My next-door neighbor, Deb O’Dell, completed her commitment to the Boston-based consulting company, then left to start her own venture capital firm. Deb and Dave continued their midwinter vacations to the Cayman Islands, and Deb and her sister continued playing, and winning, in the women’s paddle tennis league.
Artist and Realtor Jamie Columbus divorced, and moved to another section of Brighton. Her new neighborhood included an example of the kind of public space she advocated: a small, triangular park at the point where three residential streets converge. “The kids ride their bikes there to play baseball, and I can read and watch them play,” she told me. The park hosts a Memorial Day parade, Labor Day picnic, and Halloween carnival. “The physical structure of this neighborhood is superior,” she said. “As a neighborhood, for me it works well.”
Bill Fricke and Susan Hyman invited me to the Bar Mitzvah of their son, Jonathan (“Bubba”). Once again, Bill spoke movingly. “You came with no owner’s manual,” Bill said publicly to his son. “So I had to learn a lot. I wanted you to grow up to be kind, so I had to learn to be kinder. I wanted you to grow up to be patient, so I had to learn to be more patient.” Bill could still hit just the right note.
Newspaper carrier Brian Kenyon gave up his route. A promotion and raise at his day job allowed Brian the luxury of sleeping through the night and enjoying more time with his family. And Ralph Pascale, after delivering the mail on Sandringham for so many years, retired. Ralph continued his volunteer work with Vietnam vets and the local VA hospital.
In April 2008, Lou Guzzetta died in his sleep, at home. He was eighty-six years old. A funeral mass was held at the same church where more than fifty years earlier Lou and Edie had married. I was honored to serve as a pall bearer. The obituary in the local paper said: “Lou served his country as a surgeon with the Marine Corps; his community as a dedicated, skilled physician; his family as a proud and loving husband and father; and all who knew him as a charming, often challenging, always caring, and ever sweet companion, neighbor, and friend.”
A week or so later, as they began cleaning out the house in preparation for sale, Lou’s children generously invited me to take anything I wanted in remembrance. I walked slowly through the house, revisiting all the rooms where Lou and I had spent so much time. In the end, I accepted just a few personal items: a tie, a pair of slippers, a wristwatch. But really, I didn’t need anything; Lou had already given me so much.
THE community of neighbors that I’d set out to find, I had found. Had I not undertaken the deliberate effort to meet them, I would never have known Lou Guzzetta’s wisdom, or Deb O’Dell’s talent and energy, or Jamie Columbus’s artistry, or Bill Fricke’s quiet strength of character. And I would have missed the chance, by embracing Patti DiNitto, to try to redeem in a small way our neighborhood’s failure to have known Renan Wills.
In all, I had contact in one way or another with nearly half of the thirty-six households on my street. Most neighbors, I’d learned, wanted more or less the
same thing: to live among others with a sense of common humanity, expressed through a willingness to know and be known. Even the ones who had declined to cooperate with me had expressed much the same desire. I’d also learned that at times there is just no substitute for a neighbor close at hand. Friends at work or at church or at the tennis club are fine, but a friend even minutes away can be a friend too far. Lou Guzzetta’s daughter lived just twenty minutes away. Renan’s friend Ayesha lived fifteen minutes away. Fifteen or twenty minutes can be a long time when you’re stuck in bed in the middle of the night with a back spasm, as Lou had been, or when your husband is downstairs feeding mortgage papers into the fire.
Did the neighborhood change at all through my efforts? For those I came to know well, and introduced to each other, I think there developed a greater sense of community. How many ripples spread out from that core group? I can’t say; perhaps time will tell. I’m not sure if I’ll be here, though. My son, Ben, is nearing college age and already this house feels too big; soon it will be time for me to downsize.
But I’ll leave with wonderful memories. Coming to know each of these neighbors has enriched my life; it was an experience I’ve been eager to share.
In June 2008, I wrote an essay about it, which was published as an Op-Ed in the New York Times under the title, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” It seemed to hit a nerve. Readers responded with hundreds of comments and letters to me, and for a time it was among the paper’s most frequently e-mailed columns. The comments were overwhelmingly positive. They came from India, Oman, Germany, England, France, Mexico, Canada, and many of the fifty states. Some of those responding lamented the loss of close neighborhood ties; others recounted happy memories of growing up in friendlier neighborhoods than the ones they now live in. And many wanted to share inventive ways they’d found to improve their own neighborhoods:• In Old Oaks, an area east of downtown Columbus, Ohio, neighbors take turns hosting “Wednesdays on the Porch.” These are social hours where neighbors come to chat. As a result, wrote Doug Motz, “my family and friends are consistently amazed that I know my neighbors, they know me and we have an involvement in each others’ lives that goes beyond fences.”
• In San Rafael, California, after years of “scarcely knowing” their neighbors, Mike Van Horn and his wife began hosting annual parties for their neighbors, a practice other neighbors have taken up. The parties now draw thirty to forty people. “These shindigs have clearly strengthened our local neighborhood,” wrote Mike, “and we now live within an expanding circle of friends, not strangers.”
• To follow up a block party in his neighborhood close to downtown Portland, Oregon, Dennis Maxwell created a neighborhood map showing locations of the families, names, children, pets, telephone numbers, and work numbers for emergencies. All new residents get a map. “We exchange child care, take care of mail [and] newspapers, and water plants during vacations,” reported Maxwell. Neighbors have also exchanged keys to help when people are locked out. “This neighborhood really works for us,” he added.
• In ten communities in Oregon, photographer Julie Keefe joined with middle school students to interview and photograph neighbors as part of a statewide arts project called “Hello Neighbor.” Then they hung mural- size black-and-white photographs with text throughout the communities to introduce the neighborhood to its children and neighbors to each other. (For more on this project, sponsored by the Caldera arts organization, visit www.helloneighborproject.org.)
• In Marne, France, neighbors hold fête des voisins (“neighbors’ eve”) when, as described by resident Veronique Masson, people gather in front of their houses and share Champagne, pizza, cakes, and quiches. “Knowing your neighbor instead of ignoring them is like being a thread in a tapestry,” she wrote. “Alone, this thread seems colourless, but put on the loom with other threads, it can become a thing of beauty.”
• In Reno, Nevada, the last week in June is “Get to Know Your Neighbor Week,” sponsored by the Conscious Community Network. It’s a celebration that has generated more than sixty-five simultaneous pot lucks, barbecues, block parties, and other gatherings, with thousands of participants. “Many folks who organize gatherings continue with what we have called ‘caring circles’ that go year round to connect neighbors to each other,” wrote Richard Flyer.
• In a neighborhood north of Oakland, California, on Thursday evenings residents hold an outdoor film festival, showing films on the side of a bank building. “Last week, I wandered down to find over a hundred neighbors gathered, sitting on lawn chairs right there in the middle of 49th street, watching a series of short films together,” wrote a resident named Ian. “What a success!”
• In Pelham, New York, Anne Jacobi hosts “coffees” to introduce neighbors on her block, something she has done for nine years. “I suggest it to anyone, as it is easy to host,” she wrote. “You just need a coffeepot, muffins and cookies, and a welcoming mat!”
• From Philadelphia, a woman named Renee wrote, “If you are a bit on the shy side, start a garden in front of your house and plant yourself out there. Neighbors I knew only by sight now see my outside and stop by to chat. Make yourself available and you will be surprised what doors—and hearts—will open.”
RECENT U.S. Census data show that 22 percent of the homes and 38 percent of the apartments in this country are occupied by just one person. That works out to nearly 30 million people living alone, a higher number than ever before recorded. Add to that an economic recession that often puts travel and paid entertainment out of reach. So if there was ever a good time to break down the barriers that separate us from our neighbors and instead take advantage of the potential for companionship close at hand, that time is now.
To do so, we really don’t need to sleep over at each other’s houses. All we need to do is deliberately set out to know the person next door, or across the street, or down the block; to ring the bell and open the door.
ONE other person wrote me. She identified herself only as Pamela, from Jackson, Mississippi. “Knowing your neighbors,” she wrote, “means when a truck backs up to your house, they know you aren’t moving and call the police. Knowing your neighbors means when your car doesn’t move for a day or two, they get worried and come see if you’re okay. Knowing your neighbors means when the ambulance comes to the house down the street, you know you can help without waiting to be asked. Yes, we all have family and friends, but neighbors are special: they are people who look out for you every day because they are there every day; they are people you can look out for every day because you care. If we all cared about our neighbors, we could change the world one street at a time.”
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Onyx, Jenny, and Paul Bullen. “Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities in NSW,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 36, no. 1 (March 2000): p. 23 and App., Part D.
Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 19.
Rose, Reginald. “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” season 4, episode 117, The Twilight Zone, directed by Abner Biberman, original air date: April 18, 1963.
Wellman, Barry, and Keith Hampton. “Living Networked in a Wired World,” Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 6 (November 1999).
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