Sometimes, for good or for ill, God or Fate or happenstance reminds us that the concept of “the home” extends beyond the walls of our house or the surveyed bounds of our real estate.
During this most recent round of frigid fun from Mother Nature, I experienced just such a reminder—an especially harsh one. To expedite the misdelivery of my mail, I was scattering rock salt on the front walk of my Carondelet bungalow, when a man crunched across the sleet-covered lawn from a red minivan parked at the curb. He, too, was toting two or three bags of some manner of melter, and his frostbitten grimace suggested the weather was thrilling him as much as me.
The man introduced himself as Terry, the brother of my neighbor Bill, and apologized for burdening me with bad news: Judy, Bill’s wife, had died that Saturday. Medical woes had hospitalized Bill—another fact of which I knew nothing—and Judy was preparing to visit him at Barnes, Terry told me, when a massive heart attack claimed her life.
Aghast, I stammered my condolences and thanked Terry for notifying me. Then I bumbled away through that gray, awful morning before the tears could freeze on my face.
Today, of course, we occupy a world at once minute and monumental, its contours forever ostensibly reshaped by the Internet in general and by so-called social media like Twitter in particular. Now, I would never gainsay cyberspace, where one or two passwords and a couple of mouseclicks supposedly unfold the wonders of the whole globe. After all, it’s fostered (among other things) this blog and my Amazon addiction.
That said, this glamorous, networked world scarcely existed when I bought my modest little bungalow. On my arrival in 1992, Judy—a lovely, elfin lady with a ready laugh—greeted me with a homemade cheesecake, and through the years, Bill has never failed to hail me with a bearish bonhomie. The two of them always epitomized for me everything right and true about the city’s South Side, in fact. No tweet could ever be as sweet as knowing such fine folks lived next door, and despite the legions of Friends one can muster at a moment’s notice in 2011, Facebook can at best only ape the nondigital neighborliness they’ve perennially extended.
So, dear reader, if you yourself enjoy the good fortune of having in your life a Bill and Judy, consider giving them a hug at the earliest opportunity—because good neighbors still remain worth more than all the ones and zeroes in all the computers connected to the Web.
