Won't You Be My Neighbor?

I suppose it started for me when we moved into our first real house as a married couple. I feel silly admitting it, but I sort of expected people to show up at our door with baked goods, welcoming us to the neighborhood and introducing themselves. Days went by before I realized that not only was I not going to be visited by the welcome wagon, but people would go out of their way to pretend that they hadn't noticed that anyone had moved in. A year later, my naive self thought: "Surely the birth of our baby will bring out those neighborly instincts!" Luckily in my alternating panic, stupor, and adoration after Sprout's birth, I didn't notice the complete absence of neighborhood visitors nor the distinct lack of casseroles. Our church was very supportive when Sprout had his surgery. A woman delivered some mums leftover from a harvest service, and another asked me to drive the 20 minutes to her place to pick up some chili she'd made for us. Gaia bless the Unitarians.

When we moved to our new home, I saw the chance to make it the neighborhood I dreamed of. We set up for trick-or-treat the day after moving into our home, but few candy-beggars visited. A month later at Christmas time, I baked cookies and Beo and I delivered them to the neighbors, introducing ourselves since only our next-door neighbors had introduced themselves to us. Mostly we got looks of confusion and muttered thanks. The neighbors we knew gave us some of her own cookies a couple of days later. Reciprocity, I suppose. Was it that no one expects those kind of neighborly gifts and longer? Is it that people don't want to feel indebted to someone? Is it simply an overvaluation of privacy? After the second horrified look of a new neighbor presented with a load of fresh baked bread, I gave up. I stopped saying "Hello" when walking neighbors pretended not to hear me--or even crossed to the other side of the street. I stopped waving then every driver looked the other way--or worse, stared at me impassively. If they didn't want to be my friends, well I didn't want to be their friends either. So there.

I had settled into this frame of mind nicely. After all, we don't even have a "Neighborhood Association". It's a "Homeowner's Association". My neighbor-free life was broken only by pleasant surprises from our next door neighbors. One, a seamstress, asked if she could make Bird a Christmas Dress. Another, a pastor, offers us gifts of extra food from his church, and once even a jar of Apple Butter ("No preservatives or anything, and all of that natural stuff!" Gods bless him, too.) to thank us for sharing some excess produces. I neighbor them right back with pesto kits from the garden (complete with pine nut baggies!) and heirloom veggies (complete with history and recipe suggestions!).

My reverie of non-neighborness was broken by a conversation with my Dad. They're considering getting a play system for the kids, and my Dad asked if anyone else in our subdivsion had a play system yet. When we told him that we'd be the first, he said he thought we'd be surprised at how many friends we suddenly discovered when our play system was installed. I was a bit taken aback. Would people really bring their kids to our backyard? Did I want them to? The next week on an early morning run I spotted a play system like the model we'd been considering. It was one subdivision over. As I rounded the cul de sac, I realized that the house right across from them had a similar system, and there was a third right next door. They were all neatly fenced into their own spacious yards. I began to wonder if this lack of neighborliness had it's drawbacks after all. The following week in a more tighly packed rural suburb, I saw 3 play systems in adjoining yards. Back to back. I doubt they were even the reccomended distance apart from foreign objects. I felt tears spring to my eyes. What's more, we were on our way to an incredible neighborhood playground--just 2 blocks away.

This week on a flight to Pittsburgh I prepared myself to enjoy the bird's eye view of the country as we descended. Instead of pure amazement, I was shocked to see the rows of swimming pools that lined the backyards of the suburbs with matching houses. What about that 5th house--the one that broke the perfect line of pools? Even the smaller neighborhoods, obviously lower (middle) class even from the air, were dotted with splotches of blue. (It was very easy to find an example.) What's the point of all this chlorine?

So far I've seen our lack of neighborliness isolating our children, isolating adults, creating akwardness, and driving excess. Is there anything else? In a recent article in Plenty, the author cited two studies which seem to point to our lack of social contact as one of the key factors in our skyrocketing anxiety rates. Now not every neighborhood has fallen to this depressing phenomenon. Our good friends live in a neighborhood where neighborhood barbecues, babysitting co-ops, and even group dates are the norm. They seem to be an exception to an ever-expanding rule though. The organization I direct has a mission, which I wrote: "Neighbors Serving Neighbors in Need". We call our services of visits, rides to the doctor's office, help with grocery shopping "neighborly-type" services. The only issue is that we have to recruit and import the neighbors to help them. Let me tell you from experience: A lot of folks out there could use a good neighbor. Our program and others like it only see a growth in demand.

Do Sprout and Bird see any parity between the lively neighbors of Sesame Street and our own? Do they ever envy (as I do) Mr. Rogers' friends, delivery men, and mayor popping in to say hello and have a visit? Maybe that kind of neighborhood is as imaginary to them as Dora and Calliou's neighborhood. Maybe they don't even know that they used to really exist. Maybe the don't realize that they still can. I'm reversing my stance on the acceptance of my non-neighborly neighborhood. I'm going to be knocking on doors again this year, armed with christmas cookies. We'll make this neighborhood a community yet.

Tidings of Cookies and Joy

I've done it again: completely freaked out some perfectly nice suburbians by being neighborly. It was all entirely worth it. We had the standard unanswered doors, reciprocal cookies, and guilty "You do this every year and we never give you anything!" Yes, that's the point my friend, my neighbor--the joy of giving! Heck, we're neighbors! This year aside from those standards I caught a neighbor in their jammies. He was very embarassed but I don't feel bad because: 1. He didn't have to answer the door, and 2. I totally owed him. It was payback time.

This year I made four kinds of cookies (about 200 I think: iced sugar, soft molasses, dairy-free snickerdoodles, and oatmeal carmelitas), caramels, and truffles. I put together 8 tins: 4 for our nearest neighbors, 1 for the only other neighbors who are neighborly to us, 1 for my volunteer coordinator at work, 1 for the annual family reunion, and 1 for us (We deserve it.). I also put together four plates for the bakesale at church. It was a lot of work, but I really loved every minute of it. That much energy going into building a real neighborhood is absolutely worth it. At best, I make some friends and lighten the mood while connecting neighbors in our suburb. At worse-or maybe even better-is that the kids see the real effort that goes in to the process of giving, from planning, shopping and baking, to packing and delivering the tins. I hope that even if my spark does nothing in our neighborhood, my kids will grow up to see giving to others as a natural thing, and will always believe in creating community where before there were just plain old people and houses.

Crackers

We're having friends over for lunch today, which means I get to splurge just a wee bit on the food budget. I'm serving a frugal muffin and soup main course, but the big to-do is the feta walnut pate I'll serve beforehand. I picked up the feta and fresh parsley, then headed for the cracker aisle. I've been trying to avoid buying snacky things, so it's been awhile since I've perused there. I was shocked at how expensive organic crackers were. There were a few conventional brands that were $3-$4 a box, but the organic crackers were $6 and up. With our frugal cooking lately, even $3 seems like a lot to spend on one item. My neighbor gave us some crackers a while back. She had made them while experimenting with different recipes to accomodate her daughters many allergies. I decided to give it a try myself.

I found a simple recipe on Allrecipes.com. This is a nice recipe website because you can read reviews by other users and see what modifications they made to the recipe. It's a very simple starter, and I decided to make them straight up this first time around. The dough is made from:

• 1 3/4 c. whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup water

It's a very easy dough to work with. Once the dough is formed you roll it to approximately 1/8" thick. For the first batch, I laid a piece of parchment paper over my rolled out dough, and used a pizza cutter to make straight edges and trim the dough to fit the baking sheet. (The recipe instructions call for an ungreased cookie sheet, but I love my parchment paper!) I also used the pizza cutter to mark the lines for the crackers. You score the dough, but don't cut all the way through. Next use a fork to pierce a few vents into each cracker. Bake the crackers at 350 for 15-20 minutes. (About 18 minutes worked for me.) While my first batch was baking, I collected and rolled out the trimmings from my first batch to make a second batch. For this one I left the edges ragged so as not to waste any of the dough. My second batch turned out crispier. I think I may have gotten them a bit thinner with less dough to work with, so next time I'll probably seperate the dough into two before rolling it out. These are a very basic cracker, perfect for highlighting the intense flavor of the pate. They are also a great springboard for making any variety of crackers. You could try adding dried herbs, parmesan, cracked pepper, paprika, or any number of flavors. This box-worth of crackers probably cost less than $1 to make, and was quite simple. I may never buy crackers again!

Just Sayin'

And now, for something completely different!

One Tribe
Black Eyed Peas--The E.N.D.

Lyrics -- best I could do tonight, forgive my mistakes and lack of proper repeats!

One Tribe, one time, one planet, one race
It's all one blood don't care about your face
Color of your eye or the tone of your skin
Don't care where you are, don't care where you been

'Cause where we gonna go, is where we wanna be
The place where the native language is unity
And the continent is called Pangea
And the main ideas are connected like a sphere

No propaganda to try to upperhand us
'Cause man I'm lovin' this peace,
Man I'm loving this peace
Man I'm loving this peace

I don't need no leader that's gonna force feed a
concept to make me think I need ta
fear my brother, and fear my sister
and shoot my neighbor with my big missile

If I had an enemy, enemy
If I had an enemy, enemy
If I had an enemy then my enemy's
gonna try to come an' kill me
cause I'm his enemy.

There's One Tribe y'all
One Tribe y'all
We are one people
Let's cast amnesia
forget about all that evil
all that evil that they feed ya
remember we are one people
We are one people

One Tribe, one time, one planet, one race
One love one people, one
Too many things that's causin' one
to forget about the main cause

Connecting, uniting, but the evil
is seeded and alive in us
So our weapons are collidin',
and our peace is sinkin' like Poseidon

But we know that the one
the evil one is threatened by the sum
so he come and try to separate the sum
But he dumb

He didn't know we had a way to overcome
rejuvanatin' by the beating of the drum
come together by the supper of the hum
Freedom when all become one, forever.

It's One Tribe y'all
One Tribe y'all
We are one people
Let's cast amnesia
forget about all that evil
all that evil that they feed ya
Remember we are one people
We are one people

One love, one blood, one people
One heart, one beat, we equal
Connected like the internet
United that's how we do

Let's break one soul we situ
Let love and peace lead you
We can overcome the complication
cause we need to

Help eachother make these changes
Brother Sister rearrange this
We are fakin but we can change this
bad condition break

Use your mind and not your greed
Let's connect and help proceed
This is something I believe
We are one, we're all just people.

One Tribe y'all
One Tribe y'all
We are one people
Let's cast amnesia
forget about all that evil
all that evil that they feed ya
remember we are one people
We are one people
One Tribe y'all
One People

Lord help me out
trying to figure out what it's all about
'cause we're one and the same
same choice, same pain

And I hope that you get what I need ya
'cause maybe we need amnesia
and I don't wanna sound like a preacher
but we need ta be one

One war, one love, one passion
One tribe one understanding
cause you and me can
become one
***
New album is out--check it out!

Close Up of Spring--Baby Robins

Greetings Dear Readers! I am taking the week off from both of my (paid) jobs, so I'm hoping to catch up with all of the blog posts I've had sitting in the hopper! First, I'd like to share the special close up of Spring we had the treat to see this year. A momma robin built her nest under the tiny eaves of the kids' playground in our backyard. We thought for sure she'd give up on it with the kids always running around, but no, soon there were three twee blue eggs, and one day Sprout noticed that one had hatched. I decided to take a picture so that the kids could get a close up view without traumatizing the mama. By the time I got the camera out, there were 2 babies. This was May 17th.

We tried to have the kids avoid the playground as much as possible after that. The momma would get super irritated even if the kids were in the vicinity. We didn't want to bug her, nor did we want the kids to get a pecking. We promised them they'd have their playground back soon, but I didn't look up how soon we could expect that to be. Well a week and a half later, we were outside while I hung out the laundry, and Sprout noticed that one of the babies was on the playground mulch. We got a towel and I went and looked at it. He was pretty sturdy, but I was afraid he'd be dog bait, so I gently scooped him up and climbed up the playground ladder and set him back down on his brothers/sisters. That was May 28th.

Just 3 days later, Bird came running upstairs early in the morning to tell us that the baby robin had come to visit. We wrote it off to her dreamy mind, but when Beo went downstairs, he came up laughing and told me I had to come look. Sure enough, there was a baby robin, right in the bush about 18 inches in front of our living room window. I tried to get some pictures through the screen. Poor momma was going crazy. She kept trying to come bring him food but she was scared to come so close to the house. She mostly sat on the bird feeder out front and squawked like crazy! Later that morning we were out front and had forgotten that the baby was so close. When I saw him I decided to get a closer picture. I got this shot, and then off he flew--right into the road! He just sat there so I walked around him to try to herd him back into the yard. He actually flew right up onto the neighbor's roof, so I wasn't worried about his flying ability then. Momma Robin was much happier taking food to him over there. We got squawked at a bit more that afternoon when we were in the backyard, but by the next day there was no sign of momma or babies. We're hoping that she might come again next year though. It was a really neat experience for all of us.

The Economy v. The Economy

I think it's safe to say at this point that all of us have been affected in some way by that dreaded elephant in the room: The Economy. Maybe you've had your hours cut back at work, or have had a spouse, friend or family member lose their job. Perhaps you've seen your favorite restaurant close its doors, or a local plant shut down. Maybe you've seen an increase in the cost of some of your own expenses. Our household has been lucky thus far in that our own jobs haven't been affected--yet. But with Beo working in retail and myself working for a non-profit, we know that nothing is certain. We've watched friends, colleagues and neighbors lose hours, jobs, and even their houses. Learning that a neighbor packed up and left in the night is sobering (especially when it happens more than once). So months ago, we started tightening our belts and building up savings. We tried to get back to basics with food, stop going out to eat, spend much less on clothes, and cut back on the "extras". I stopped collecting dolls and sold off most of my collection to help pay bills and build up our savings. We're in good company, knowing that likely millions of other families are doing the same thing.

So we're feeling pretty good, though nervous, as we build up our potential "island", even as it's been challenged by medical bills and the like, and then we start looking out in the community and realizing: What is going to happen to the businesses we support if they don't get our dollars? Yes, we can go to the library instead of the local book store, but how many families can do that before the book store has to shut down? What about the local family-run restaurant, or the indy coffee house? Beo is baking bread again, but what about the new local organic bakery we just discovered, that is trying to get off the ground? We have to face that this is a dangerous dichotomy. We can build our own ark, or we can reach out to the community and figure out how to keep the flood waters at bay. Those who know us probably know that we've decided to go for the latter. It is a bit of a balancing act, and we have to be wise, but we believe it's necessary. These small local businesses reflect a model that we know is more sustainable not just for society, but for our environment. If we get through the current economic crisis ourselves and have no local bookstore, no local indy coffeehouse (which buys our produce), no local bakery, then how much have we gained? Futhermore, when these businesses close, business connections are severed, hurting more companies, and jobs are lost. It is in everyone's best interest to keep our local businesses strong.

So we're being smart with our money, but we're making sure to share what we have with the businesses that we most want to support. Baking our own bread may save me $20 a week, but it doesn't save the local bakery, and I can make room for that $20 in our budget. If we all work together, we can get through this as a larger community--not just here in our community, but in yours too, and as a nation. We can't do it alone. Last night when Beo took Sprout to the local bookstore, he questioned the owner about the signs announcing an "Inventory Reduction Sale". She confirmed his suspicions that she will likely be closing her doors soon. It's so difficult to watch a small, family operated business fail, especially when it is an important cultural hotspot for a small community. So please, take care of yourself, and your family, but don't forget to support the web that your strand is a part of, and help to keep that strong as well. Let's all try to do our part and work together to keep our communities strong.

The Monster in the Living Room

When we moved into our home 18 months ago, we made an excellent decision. Our living room would be TV free. We relegated the TV, VCR, and Playstation to the basement. The basement is unfinished, and we have a play area for the kids, but we only went down once in a while to let the kids watch PBS. I only had a couple of programs that I liked to watch, but with bad reception in the basement, I gave up the TV altogether. I would watch movies on our computer, but no more commercials. More knitting, less straight-out vegging.

A few months ago, our neighbor was kind enough to babysit when I went to an evening Volunteer Orientation. To make it easier, we brought the TV up from the basement. Plug in the kids. The next day, the TV didn't make it back to the basement. Nor the next. Now, months later, here I sit in the living room, with the TV lurking. Big bulky TV, cords, antenna, everything I don't want in the feel of this room. So why is the TV winning? Well the main reason is that it's far easier to let the kids watch 15 minutes of TV where I can see them while I prepare a meal, pick up, etc. I avoided the TV myself at first. Now, as I try to catch up on my knitting, I've started watching again myself.

I've been shocked to see the correlation between my mood and my TV watching. A few months ago I glibly quoted a study showing a direct relation between depression and women who watched TV. I realize that many factors play into this: less exercise, lack of other hobbies, etc. However I think so much of it is the TV itself. We are bombarded with stories-real and imagined-of drama, horror, and tragedy. Even my favorites like E.R.-so many depressing stories, so much stress. I have caught myself getting sucked into the emotions. Then we have the commercials, which give specifics to what we've been seeing on the programs themselves. We could: be prettier, be thinner, be better hydrated, have nicer furniture, find a better lawyer, keep a cleaner house, take a pill to fix those pesky problems like stress. The message we hear, over and over, is: You could be doing better. I am infuriated just thinking about it. Yet it keeps drawing me back, and I don't understand why. Kill your TV indeed.