XXXVII. the mr. rogers question

on borrowing, childhood, and proximity

As a child of the suburbs I was blessed with neighborhood friends—bike friends, public pool friends, bus friends I would greet at 5:45am with the remnants of a cinnamon roll crusted to my face, to-go bacon fisted in my pocket—children whose names I don’t remember, who I was thrust into friendship with due to proximity (or because my grandparents let me have a trampoline without the net which made me very popular for a time). I recall the general buzz when a gay couple moved into the neighborhood: lesbian hairdressers with a son too young to be a real friend, but old enough that I could take on an elder sister bossiness for the hour it took my mom to get her hair cut. In my recollection, there are large swathes of time where I am just wandering about with faceless companions. I remember exploring a large pipe that was at the end of the creek in the backyard. We walked through the dark in a handheld chain and came out on the other side of the neighborhood. Before going home I almost certainly went into someone’s house for a snack and pee break—if you are a parent in the suburbs is there a five-year period when you just have to accept that at any given moment there are two to six random children in and around your house? Though I am looking back with the rosy tint of nostalgia, it is very different to forge relationships in a city, particularly one you are not native to.

When my mom and I moved to Philadelphia we did not engage with anyone outside of our two-person household. We didn’t know anyone and it did not seem that anyone wanted to know us. In our first apartment, the closest neighborly interaction I had was sitting with the lady who ran the ailing fabric store downstairs. To be a transplant in any city, is to be painfully individual. Each acquisition comes by effort, proximity is not sufficient. The relational mode of “the neighbor” must be insisted upon. Today, I am lucky to have so many friends in the city, but only now, in my fourth year of living here, am I coming to understand the importance of the neighbor.

Two weeks ago I was scouring the city for cake supplies. A classic New York runaround, each ingredient had to be purchased at a different store. When I got to a big ticket item, a food scale, I hesitated. Googling, “where to get food scale near me,” I was struck by the fact that I was mere blocks away from a friend’s apartment, a friend who cooks. One text later and I had a food scale free of charge. The next day I delivered back her scale along with a thick slice of chocolate cake.

Perhaps it speaks to a general societal collapse that I could not get over this interaction. This was downright neighborly. This was “borrow a cup of sugar” territory. In some ways, it is a goal of mine to not have to borrow things. My grandma is horrified that I use the spare key I have to my friend’s apartment to go “shopping” in her closet when she’s out of town. It will be nice to one day have the freedom to purchase a new outfit per occasion, but I don’t know if I would ever actually want to give up scrolling through Anna’s closet. The trust is grounding, it feels like community. As we scrabble to advance our solo pursuits—money, career, partner, apartment—it is nice to fall back into some bartering, a little open house, what’s mine is yours.

Maybe I am just missing the ease of maintaining relationships. One of my group chats was all caps this week: in our far flung corners we are arguing before federal judges, passing PhD qualifying exams, matriculating, rediscovering old passions, baking cakes. Of course I wish I could be present for these monumental moments, to celebrate them in a more substantial way than than the heart react in iMessage, but more than anything I wish I could ask if they have an extra lemon I could use. It is one thing to plan a group trip, another to be together in the small ways. For those of us who live close, we do make the effort to see each other regularly. There are impromptu dinners, work drop-ins, walks without destination, but there’s something special about considering the neighbor as a distinct mode of a relationship. Taking in a package, watering a plant…perhaps I am just experiencing the embodied veracity of the age old adage: sharing is caring.

This week I was in a workshop where we used one of those giant rainbow parachutes you used to have in elementary school. We’d flap it up into a mushroom cloud and then dive under, pulling the fabric taut under our butts to trap the air—an igloo, a womb, a fortress, sustained by body weight at the edges and hot, panted breath at the center. When we opened our rehearsal room we invited the audience to join, twenty grown bodies sitting criss cross applesauce, grinning and giggling under a rainbow dome. Will anything make us feel as exhilarated as the time we made an igloo out of thin air? It is that feeling I am chasing this summer. I insist we do some neighborhood kid things: running until the streetlights come on, breathless and nameless unless you are “It.”

xx

Mia