Rowhouse land

I live in rowhouse land. A city block in an old part of an old city – mostly gentrified and made hip in the early part of the decade, but with enough longtime residents, shops, and local customs to have kept some measure of authenticity. I’m part of the gentrification boom. I’m under 30, from the suburbs, and I bought a freshly rehabbed one-bedroom alley-house three years ago.

There’s an elderly woman who lives about half a block up from me, and in the warm months, she sits on her stoop almost every day and makes polite conversation with passersby. Always a smile, always a nice comment, and I always return the nicety and go on my way.

When I walk a couple blocks south, I usually find a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a veterans cap sitting on his front steps. He’s a bit grumpier than the elderly woman – the smile doesn’t come as easily – but he always says hello, and he’s usually surrounded by neighbors who’ve come out onto their front steps, cheap domestic beer in hand. There are a few young children (maybe grandkids?) who play in an inflatable pool they set up on the sidewalk. Nobody seems to be talking about anything of much importance, just enjoying the company on a pleasant summer night – probably as they did last year, the year before, etc…

Decades ago (maybe pre-boomer?) I imagine this was the default. If you weren’t part of this kind of scene, you were just “weird” or antisocial. Nobody cared about introversion, nobody cared about a person’s capacity for small talk (probably nobody even used the phrase “small talk,” instead likely referring to it as “conversation.”) You became friends with people because they lived nearby, not because of shared interests. Now we’re more sensitive – people are wired differently, and not everyone will communicate in the same ways. Let people find their niche. And I guess that’s supposed to be progress. But I don’t know. I’m shy around strangers.  I like my privacy.  I sometimes have a hard time with small talk. And I find myself wishing pretty often now that I hadn’t grown up in an era where that was accepted and coddled – the “self-esteem generation” (to steal a phrase).

It’s not that I think everyone should conform to a set standard – that we should all be extroverted small-talkers who sit on the stoop and bemoan the yupsters, hipsters, intellectuals and artists who have taken over a big chunk of the neighborhood. I just think it would’ve been nice to have been raised in an environment where, instead of having it reinforced that it’s okay not to fit in, I had been tossed into the lion’s den and taught that I wasn’t so special. Maybe if my entire generation had been taught that lesson, there’d be a bit more social diversity at these impromptu summer neighborhood gatherings. We’d probably have a lot to learn from each other.

Anyway, it’s a bit Utopian, I guess, and the truth is we’re not going back. People like me move in, and maybe we admire the “old ways” from a distance (or maybe we patronize them like a city couple vacationing in the country commenting on how “cute” everything is). But admire or patronize, we don’t join in. I walk past, I say something to the elderly woman about the weather, nod to the guy with the veterans cap and hope for a smile. Then I go on my way. I wouldn’t have the first clue how to become a part of that world… nobody ever told me I had to.