Back in August on National Night Out, our inner-city block party attracted a phenomenal number of people. The firefighters who stopped by to let the kids climb on the truck commented that they'd already made a dozen stops (remember, lots of block parties on the same night) and ours was the most crowded. Kids all over the place, neighbors chatting — some of us doing our best to navigate a couple of different languages — kids jumping in a rented inflatable thing. "We have to do stuff like this more often," we said to each other.
You know what? Slowly it's starting to happen. Two or three households stepped up to the plate. One young couple with a baby, and a lovely old remodeled house on a corner lot, apparently decided to be the house that always hosts the block club meetings. They got a big wooden sign for their yard and started sticking it out front: "NEIGHBOR MEETING 8 PM SAT HERE." Another couple down the street, also with a young baby, started going door to door and dropping flyers. "Litter Pick Up Saturday/Ayudanos Limpiar Nuestras Calles Sabado. Doughnuts and Coffee Afterward/Despues compartiremos pastels y cafe." We're lucky that each of those households has one adult who speaks fluent Spanish — maybe that's why they were the ones who stepped up to the plate and really made it happen. (Me, when I volunteered to drop flyers for National Night Out, I borrowed a neighbor girl to come along and speak Spanish for me.)
Yesterday I skipped my usual breakfast out and went to the litter pickup. At least a dozen households showed up: families with young children, a hairnetted elderly lady named Odessa — I remembered her from the block party because she reminds me of my own grandma MJ, a Spanish-speaking couple with two little kids and Abuelita, being pushed in a wheelchair, herself pushing the stroller with the baby in front.We went all around four city blocks. Along the way we collected a few new e-mail addresses. At the end, after the coffee and doughnuts were gone, there were still four or five families left in the backyard we had retired to, all with little kids, and Mark and I invited them to our house for a grill out the first Monday in November. (Political talk to be banned in the interest of neighborliness.)
I took on the job of trying to get an email list set up. Not everyone on the block is interested, but it seemed like a good idea to try for a dozen or so. Slowly it's going. Also I started bugging the city about speed bumps. Maybe it'll happen.
The foreclosed homes on our street have been standing empty for longer than I can remember. Mark, who had been talking about moving west to the suburbs, has lately gotten more resigned to staying in our house for longer than he'd hoped; he's been talking about finishing out the attic, building a climbing wall in the stairwell (he says it's so he doesn't have to drywall it. hmm). I'm glad to stay here; I wish someone would open a coffee shop a couple of blocks away, of course, but hey, a Family Dollar and an auto parts store just went in less than a mile away; that'll be good for the neighborhood. And with neighbors working together — even if it's just a few households — to know each other, to know the kids, maybe in time it will be a place where our children can roam the sidewalks, at least as far as the end of the block.
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