Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods.

For my immigrant parents' generation, there usually were about three main ones, until they grew old, and migrated with the other snow-birds to sunnier climes. The first was where they spent their childhood. For my father, that was in a small farmhouse in the countryside outside of London, Ontario. For my mother, that was in the village of Eaglesham, outside of Glasgow, Scotland.

The second was where they lived once they landed in this country. For both of my parents, this was a vibrant community that exists today only as a shell of its former self: Detroit, Michigan.

The third was where they settled in the post-war boom that defines modern America. In our case, my family lived for half of my childhood in Royal Oak, and the second half in Bay City, two small towns in Michigan.

In all of these neighborhoods there were the normal cast of characters -- relatives, friends, crazy people, bad eggs, and eggheads. My Dad was especially skilled at describing his boyhood gang of buddies to me, as I rode around with him on his rounds as a salesman for the Borden milk company in the early '50s.

(Somewhere among my massive collection of junk I still have an Elsie the Borden Cow button from this era.)

Each one of his friends, who collectively covered a wide range of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities, had a nickname, in addition to proclivities that revealed their vastly separate heritages. This one liked pasta with garlic, that one ate bagels and lox, this one loved to go to a town where he could eat his favorite German meals, this one ate French.

As far as I could tell, my father never felt there was any kind of inherent hierarchy among people. He considered each friend as an individual -- one might be Italian, one Jewish, one a German Lutheran, the next a French Catholic.

But in his eyes, those differences were like spices in a meal, simply different nuances of flavor -- not a dividing line that separates one person from another. In this way, I realize, he was a great teacher for me. He loved all his friends equally. Although we would later disagree about many things, politically, and we divided along our views of race, I had already absorbed at an early age (5 or 6) his value system, which was truly the American value system: All of us are created equal.

Then, there is still the "under God" part, which neither he nor I ever fully resolved. But, that is a subject for another post.

When I started this post, I meant to write about my current neighborhood, and its characters, including Gonzo, Uncle Sam, and the Mystery Lady, but somehow my Dad's life got in my way. That's how it is with writing -- whatever comes up, comes up. Until you deal with that, there's no point in moving on to what you thought you were going to write about...