Comment: The Jekyll and Hyde Neighborhood

We used to live in an idyllic neighborhood. But for the past 11 months, we have not. It’s not terrible, but it’s not ideal.

On the surface it looks fine, but if you scratch it just a little bit, you see about every fifth house looking like a crack den, or at least an abandoned one. Lawns are brown, big, rotting boxes fill up people's porches. The gang tagging is just around the corner on one of the busy streets; on our first day in the neighborhood park, I was told by a long-time resident that the local gang “usually hangs out here at this picnic table, but hasn’t been here lately, what with the rain and all.” Did I mention it rained for the first six weeks after we moved here, every day?

Anyway, the picnic table has subsequently been removed in an effort at neighborhood improvement. But the park continues to have obscene graffiti and trash strewn in the sand box, so we tend to take our playtime elsewhere.

I’m sorry, but shopping carts abandoned on your lawn are not the new garden gnomes. Martha Stewart doesn’t have tagging on the side of her van, and she doesn’t have Carl’s Jr. wrappers in her flowerbeds.

Argh.

We don’t live in the ghetto, but we don’t live in the nice part of town, either. We managed to find the exact place where rent was affordable but if you crossed ONE street, you were in another landscape entirely. This is the neighborhood my son’s school is in. It’s lovely. So we live on the wrong side of the street.

On the “right” side, the lawns are landscaped, large oak trees frame the streets of well-kept houses, and people look up from their yard work when you pass them and smile at you.

Our hood? Not so much.

I’m not saying we don’t have nice neighbors—we do, but we only know two of them, and we live on an almost-de-sac that would encourage all neighbors to be friendly. I don’t know any of the people who live across the street from me on any side, and when we first moved in, I made the social mistake of introducing myself to the man who keeps his garage open all day long with the lights on. He probably thought I was a sociopath, but I was just following protocol from our previous hood back in SoCal, where people came over with presents to welcome you to the neighborhood.

Our neighborhood was soooo friendly (how friendly was it?) our neighbors gave us wine for Christmas, babysat for us, and came over to tell us when my daughter had unknowingly popped the trunk of our car which was sitting in the driveway. At Halloween, people bused (and vanned) in to our neighborhood because everyone was so friendly and the loot was so awesome.

When my kids and I took a walk around the block, it took 45 minutes, because we were stopped by new friends and their nice pets every five feet. It was a glorious place to live. We lived there a year, then we moved away, to a place chillier in both physical and psychological climate, and here we are. I’d tell you where but then I’d have to kill you.

So that’s where we’re at. There’s the Hyde neighborhood we long for, and the Jekyll neighborhood we live in. At least we have a place to live. In these hard times, we need to count our blessings.

Even if they’re tagged up a bit.