The Neighbors Whose Names I Don't Know
My wife loves looking at the stars. She found one of those cool apps that lets you point your phone in the sky and see the names of every heavenly body. It even shows you where things are supposed to be that you can’t see. What a friendly app.
The other night we had a perfect cloudless sky, so we went for a walk. Once outside, my wife looked up, but I looked out. She saw lights in the sky, but I saw the lights around us, the lights of our neighbors. Some porch lights here, string lights there, and fancy glowing LED ropes on another. Seeing your neighborhood is different at night. Everything is more distant, yet vaguely intimate. That simple glow, marking the place all these people call home.
Seeing the lights made me happy. It made me feel grounded. These aren’t temporary people in our lives. This is permanent. Property, dirt, ownership. This is where we have planted our flags.
Some of our neighbors I know well. The friends we have loved since high school live down the street. The person from childhood that used to accompany me on clarinet solos, he lives on the corner above us. Our neighbors to the left are the kind mother and class-act son freshly graduated from college who now lives in the big city (New York). When he is home we meet up to talk about motorcycles.
Our neighbors to the right, well, they are something special. He is a retired fire chief, veteran, pillar of the community, and just the nicest guy you ever met. Whatever tool, advice, encouragement, or support you need - he will be at the fence the moment I text. She likes to sit on the wraparound porch when that first warm morning sun hits the deck. We wave at each other when I’m coming home from a run.
A few years ago, before my first cup of coffee I had an accident which resulted in me slicing part of my head open. Oh the things we do! My neighbor was over with a first aid kit 60 seconds after my wife called 911. He arrived before the ambulance. And he got some good bragging rights out of the ordeal. The EMTs had bet that it was his house they were going to. Nope, it was the healthy 40-year-old stone mason that needed medical attention.
We have many more neighbors. Some we know, and others we don’t. Given enough time, I hope to know them all. We might not know each other’s names, but our presence around each other matters.
So my wife looks up into the beauty of the night sky. I twist in a circle, taking in all those lights representing the lives of those around us. I’m glad we’re all together tonight.
