My neighborhood died
As the neighborhood died, the ghosts lived
I walk my last remaining dog down the street and back every morning, passing the house where Tammy and her son, her husband and his brother and her sister lived. Across the street is the house where Ged and his wife Carol lived. They had two young kids. This was the nerve center of life when we first moved into the neighborhood, two houses down. A few houses the other way, lived a large family of five kids, a couple more down, a new young couple with two girls would move in a year after we did. Across the backyard, my daughter would stand at the fence with a toddler who became her best friend for a while. That toddler is now a mom of triplets and her dad, one of my last neighbor friends who knew how to do anything, died last Christmas.
Carol got cancer and died. Ged died a few years ago from the bottle. Tammy moved away and I sometimes hear from her when life gets too boring. Her sister died this past summer. A sad dad and his son he sees once a month moved into Ged and Carol’s house. Everyone except me has moved on and away. The neighborhood became quiet for a while as the housing crisis took a few more families away, the elements weathered even more as cash dried up.
And I stayed.
I should have moved on as well when the neighborhood shifted, but I needed a stable base to weather a pretty big medical thing. My kids had grown and flown, the older graduated with a BFA, tearing up the restaurant scene in NYC, the younger in her last two years of college.
I’m now the old man in that one house who walks his dog every day. “That dog is so old,” the kids probably murmur to each other as the school bus passes every morning. Eventually, my dog will die, probably soon. Her back legs have failed her more than a few times already.
New families have moved into the houses the young families of my youth once lived in, but they are not the same. We wave to each other as one would wave to a neighborhood regular they see every day, but I have not been invited inside. I know the children and have watched them grow. They pet my dog. Five years is nothing to an old man, but five years is half their lifetime. Five more is a whole lifetime.
Ten years is a blink of an eye to an old man, a shoebox of filed memories and a closet full of ghosts.
But my mirror sees the aging and my head tells me that I should move on. But my heart is not quite ready to leave this home.
One more year. One more year.
The neighborhood has also been a source of inspiration for more than a few short fiction pieces as well as some personal essays. I hope you find value in the two links I sprinkled in here.
Time flies!
So poignant.