On Community

I have a story for you today about community. I grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Mount Washington at a time when it was mostly artists and hippies, with 1920s-built garages long since tumbled down and filled with plants growing wild in the exquisite neglect of those spaces. Steep and hilly, there were houses that appeared to be slowly sliding down the hill, piled with wood scraps and overgrown with Black Walnut and foxtails, apparently abandoned but probably lived in by people who preferred to make an understatement with their landscaping. Today, new construction fills in those spaces where those falling down houses were probably not worth saving. The canyons are still there and still wild, in the sense of overgrown vegetation that few people plant on purpose. 

As kids, we walked home from school to a friend’s house everyday, whose mother watched us until our parents could get home. There would be between three and six kids walking together, along curvy Mount Washington Drive, the sidewalk in angular chunks patched with craggy asphalt which tended to slope down toward the white wooden fence that barely kept us from tumbling down the edge of the canyon. We would stop to pick pomegranates or loquats off neighbors’ trees, when they grew over the fence in the direction of our path. I dented my beloved Peanuts lunchbox, standing on a pile of our lunchboxes high enough to reach. 

We walked together because several children our age lived on the same street there (my house was around the corner). One at a time, the other kids would peel off at their houses before we got to our destination. Across the street were a family with teenage babysitters and two more houses of PTA moms that anyone at Mount Washington Elementary would have known.  We were meant to play outside until 5:00, while the adult watching us was inside going about her business, staying out of ours. The freedom and safety of that was wonderful. All around, everywhere we could go, there were adults who knew us, and who would help us if there was ever a problem. And those adults allowed us to explore and play and work out our own problems without hovering over us or providing activities, because they trusted us, somehow, to be okay. 

During the holidays, an added layer of the community there came to life. Back on the next ridge over, on the street where we lived when I was born, some old neighbors of ours had an annual Christmas party. It was a cookie exchange, and different neighbors came with their A-game cookies for everyone to try. There was hot apple cider on the stove, and daughters home from college with artistic new haircuts, wearing a lot of black. After cookies had been tasted and cider drunk, we would head out caroling, with an acoustic guitar, a tambourine, and some photocopied songbooks handed out among us. We would walk in the chilly night, up and down the steep, narrow streets of neighbors we did not know, and sing out in the street when we saw one with their lights turned on, intimating they might be home. We sang mostly choral christmas music, with some kid-favorites thrown in, and always finished with, “We wish you a Merry Christmas”. Sometimes by then one or two people would have opened a window or come out on the porch in their bathrobes to watch us and applaud. Sometimes we would sing one or two before deciding that nobody must be home. I loved the feeling of standing all together, the adults towering above me and my brother, lifting our voices together in song. It feels like one of the primal human experiences to join together that way with your little band of wanderers and sing songs you all know, full voiced and joyful in the night.

Weeks later, on New Years’ Eve, my family would host a neighborhood party. The way I remember my folks telling it, once they had kids, it became clear that if there was going to be any kind of celebration on New Year’s Eve, it should be for folks who could walk there, or at least not drive very far. Kids should be allowed, and not shushed or policed. It was deliriously fun to be a kid at that party. We would stuff ourselves into the two back bedrooms and turn out the lights, and I would tell scary ghost stories, memorized from reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and In a Dark, Dark Room over and over.  We could eat whatever party food we wanted and make an absolute mess of it, and nobody was going to scold us about it or cluck their tongues.The adults would come check on us, drink in hand, just to make sure we were alright, and then go back to actually enjoying themselves in the living room, full of light and the fading Christmas tree. It was a potluck, and we looked forward to the old favorite dishes, and delighted in the surprise ones. New Year’s Day, we would wake up and eat leftovers, watching the Rose Parade on television, too sleepy to go up the Arroyo to watch in person. 

In the decades since, geographical proximity of kids to their schools and friends to each other has seemed to dissipate. I only know a few of my neighbors by name. The older people who live on my street told me stories about how in the days when they had young children, there were regular block parties on this street, and everyone knew everyone. They all told me they were thrilled to have children in the neighborhood again. I guess that people of the age to have young children by and large can’t afford to buy a house in a neighborhood like the ones some of us grew up in. Mount Washington is no longer a well-kept secret, that’s for sure. These days, a childhood like the one I had, surrounded by people I knew and who knew my family, isn’t a given. These days, we have to build our own communities whichever way we can. 

That’s the spirit that drives me to invest in the life we build together in our little school community at Cottage. Our kids know not just the other kids and the teachers, but they know all of the grownups, too, and the grownups know them. We raise our voices in song together, children and adults, singing songs we all know or are learning so we can sing along. We bring our A-game potluck dishes to the Harvest Festival and Ice Cream social, and the kids run wild in the dark of the yard, covered in cookie crumbs and sand, socks abandoned at the bottom of the slide. We watch each other’s kids, not just our own. We give them space to work stuff out, and help each other remember that trust, that kids are capable. We raise them together, and we are all better for it.