The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, February 7th. It is the 30th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Rocks
We have good neighbors right now. We live in a duplex, and the guys in the other half are kind. They’re friendly. They’re thoughtful. When we were gone for our honeymoon, they brought in every wedding gift dropped off for us—enough to fill the stoop. When we don’t beat them to it, they bring our trash cans up the shared driveway alongside theirs on garbage day. They’ve shared their backyard seating with us. They organized the dilapidated garage. They gave us a heads up when they learned the hard way that the cops will evidently give you a parking ticket here if you’re parked with your nose facing against traffic. It’s little things, but it’s good things. They’re good neighbors.
Their good neighborness isn’t my favorite thing about them, though. My favorite thing about them is their TV.
The walls here are thin. We can hear a lot of each other, us and them. And when I sit and work at our “dining room” table, I’m adjacent to the wall we share with their living room, which means when I’m working here at night, I hear, muffled but present, whatever’s on their TV. The soundtracks to movies. The laughter from TV shows. The repetitive noises of video games.
This too is a little thing, but it’s comforting. It’s nice to have people around. Especially people towards whom you have fondness. It reminds me of the dorm in college: The last other guy still up at night in the study loft. The shower running in the next stall over on a cold fall morning. The theme song from The Office, coming through the wall behind my pillow every 22 minutes while my roommate passed the hours.
There was an article going around recently, written by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic, about the little friendships we’ve lost during the pandemic. Those with whom we share elevator rides. Those who give us the bulletin at church. Baristas. Bartenders. The people at the counter at the gym. These weren’t the exact examples Mull gave, but this was the idea I took away from it. The people with whom we interact regularly, and with whom we thereby share some piece of our personhood. Our neighbors.
I gave a Lyft ride to a woman, probably more than a year ago now, who was in town with a movie studio. She’d flown in from LA. I’d picked her up late at night, at the airport. She had me drive her to the set, which was at an old quarry far north of town, where Parmer Lane (if you know Austin) reaches 35 in its curl back east, no longer named Parmer Lane—named something about Ronald Reagan. She needed to see the set at night before working there the next day. This, she told me. She was pissed at her bosses, who’d sent her to Austin at the last second and were generally making work a hopeless, yanking job. This, she told her coworker-friend over the phone. She was exhausted. This, she didn’t say aloud, but said with near-inaudible sighs, and with blank scrolling through her smartphone, and with long empty stares out the window as we drove north on the interstate, leaving the city behind.
It was hard to find the set. We could see it through the trees—the floodlights rising from the depths of the quarry, white and looming and eerie—but it was unclear where the gate was that had been described to her by email. We drove back and forth, making u-turns on the back road, not panicked, because there was no hurry, but quiet, and tired, and comfortably together, myself seated in front of her, her bag in the trunk, my phone displaying to us both a now oscillating-ETA, the two of us united in this shared problem of finding a movie set in Central Texas in the early hours of the night. Eventually, we found a gate, and we followed it in a few dozen yards until we came to a sign saying not to trespass, that we were about to cross into a gun range, and that the gun range (if we wanted to trespass anyway, evidently) was straight ahead. There was an intersection of gravel roads here, so we got out, and she called her contact on set, and her contact told her she was probably at the right place and that someone would be up shortly to get her, and we waited together, silently, standing outside the car, her bag at her feet, me standing perhaps eight feet away. Not speaking. Just waiting. Comfortably together. After a few minutes, a large, lifted van pulled up a steep, loose path to the left, brights on, and a gruff man with a thick drawl said her name out the open window. We thanked one another for the ride. She climbed up into the van. I drove back to Austin.
I think about that Lyft ride now and then, and the bits of personhood the passenger shared. Her courtesy in the empty airport parking garage. The window into her career, with the phone call, and her discouragement with it. The window into her career, with the air of competence of her arrival, and her professionalism at it. The shared problem of finding the gate. The shared minutes—silent minutes, nothing to be said—at the intersection of the gravel roads. I think too of the bits I likely shared. The blanket in my trunk where I put her bag. The little wooden church on my dashboard. However it is I stare out the windshield at an open road. It was a basic transaction. Just a Lyft ride. But it was slightly complicated by the gate search, enough that we needed to work together, and it came at that vulnerable time of night—the early hours of weeknight darkness, when the roads are quiet and a sober melancholy sits over it all—and perhaps she did not feel a closeness, but I felt a closeness. I felt, as I realize now, like her neighbor.
They say trees communicate through their roots. I think sometimes humans do too. The presence. The calm. The slowly-growing trust. The silence. The muffled sound of a television. The comfortable togetherness. We stand alongside one another, or we hear one another through walls, or we pass one another on street corners, where the kids at the end of the block built six snowmen a few weeks ago on the day of our semi-decennial snowfall, the snowmen’s heights decreasing with each build, as flakes became scarce upon their grass. We see each other’s lives now and then, unhidden, and as they are, and as we are, and in these insights, we love one another. We love one another calmly. We love one another quietly. We love one another as neighbors. As God would have us love ourselves.
Next week’s essay: On Ash Wednesday, and Running Towards Grace
Really lovely.