Petronius (Leo Genn), the Arbiter of Taste, and Nero (Peter Ustinov) in the 1951 movie Quo Vadis
“Yeah, yeah, we have everything here. It’s all about location,” I say cheerily.
Despite my boosterish declaration, I am dismayed by a certain lack of decorum.
Only a few years ago, you could take walks and admire the gardens and houses, or perhaps criticize them, but you did not wince at the neighbors’ aggressive infliction of their life-style on you. This year political signs are “trending.” I get it, people are excited, but I am not concerned about the neighbors’ politics: the ideal neighbor is one who does not get up at dawn to rev his motorcycle and zoom around and around the block, or listen to ABBA at full blast while puttering around the yard – at 6 a.m. on Sunday!
In general I don’t want to “read” your lawn. I also object to the narcissists who post signs congratulating their offspring on being on the soccer team/football team/whatever. Is the lawn their Facebook page?
And now for the worst manifestation of bad taste: the fantastically ugly Halloween decorations. Why is Halloween a season now instead of a holiday? The towering skeletons are a nightmare. I scuttle across the street to avoid 10-foot-tall skeletons brandishing scythes. Perhaps I should take a rosary and fling holy water at these fiendish incarnations. One evening on a walk with my husband, I jumped when we passed an innovation in the skeletal department: a talking skeleton!
Everything changes – but could we have more decorum and better taste?
Petronius was Nero’s Arbiter Elegantiae (Arbiter of Taste). We need that person in our neighborhood!
I love dictionaries, not for definitions but for sample phrases and sentences: a fashionable neighborhood; to move to a nicer neighborhood; located in the neighborhood of Jackson and Vine Streets; the whole neighborhood was there.
We lived for several years in a “nice” but unfashionable neighborhood. It bordered on the edge of an obscenely wealthy neighborhood, dotted with mansions and big estates, and a crime-ridden neighborhood where shopkeepers paid for “protection.”
And, yes, I admit it, my happiest years were spent in that big, rambling, shabby apartment in an urban neighborhood. I worked at home, at a desk in the dining room. I typed fiendishly day and night, always just ahead of deadlines, and rushing into the living room to answer the phone. “Smith,” I would say briskly, as if I were in some horrible office. Well, my name isn’t Smith, but you get the gist. As if anybody thought I worked in an office! So funny, looking back. And I took my lunch break walking around a beautiful nearby park. It was heaven in the city!
Despite my indifference to home-making and decorating, I loved the apartment, especially the layout. You walked into a foyer, where we dropped the mail on my grandmother’s buffet. Our living room was under-furnished but cozy: two “reading” couches, one for Captain Nemo and one for me, where we spent whole weekends sprawling with our books and newspapers. There wasn’t a coffee table, but we had several tables, intended for the dining room, I suppose, but we used them to pile up our stuff: an enormous mahogany thing which would seat 12 people; a 1960s blond wood table with folding leaves; a carved oak table that had belonged to my husband’s great-uncle (which wouldn’t fit in his dining room, and took up half our living room); and a rickety formica kitchen table. A copy of Interview with the Vampire propped up the air conditioner in the window.
The neighborhood was convenient for transportation, with three different bus lines, and we took advantage of it. I will never forget the middle-aged Black gentleman who used to “escort” the “ladies” onto the bus. I always giggled when he took my arm and guided me up the steps. Nowadays, someone would slap a sexual harassment suit on him, but, heavens, he only took our elbows!
What happened to my favorite neighborhood was sudden. The landlord moved away, and the manager stopped doing repairs. Then the manager began renting apartments to people who, if not criminals, lived on the edge. Even the shops changed. At the cafe we saw a man pull a switchblade out of his sock. We did not wait to see what happened, but hustled out the back door. The manager rented the apartment across the hall to a prostitute, whose drunken customers banged on her door at all hours. Then our apartment was burgled. The burglar didn’t want our tables, or our books, or our typewriters. No, he she took the VCR and a pack of Royal Lunch Crackers.
In the next year, everybody moved out of the building. First, the old ladies. The most elegant, Gwendolyn Rose, had lived in the same apartment for 20 years, and had paid for the wallpaper and expensive tiled floors. “No, I can’t bear to see what they’re doing to the place,” she said sadly. Then the chatty old lady who had mysteries delivered to her from the library moved to a nursing home. She was very emotional about embarking on what she knew was the last move of her life.
And then my friends, “professionals” of roughly my age, began to leave. All of us were sad, because we loved our home. Most found condos or apartments in the neighborhood. We could have done that, too, but listened to our richer friends who thought it was absurd not to live in a house. “Everybody passes through that neighborhood, but then they move!” they told us.
Well, we have lived in some great neighborhoods and some terrible ones. The suburbs can be more crime-ridden than the cities, though people don’t admit this. A policeman told me it was dangerous to wait at the bus stop because there were suburban gangs and a LOT of drugs. (Yes, I was terrified by the people in the shelter, smoking what was definitely NOT marijuana. I waited pretty far from the shelter when I had to take the bus.) It’s best, if at all possible, to live in an urban neighborhood, where everything is within walking distance, and/or there is a choice of several buses,
Nothing can replace my charming old neighborhood, but it, alas, became a ghost town. All the shops have closed, and the apartment houses are empty or torn down.
Very sad, and I wish we had taken photos, but who had a camera? It was somewhere, but we never used it.
My friend Lee Ann wished she had not moved back to her hometown after earning a pointless Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Montana, Missoula. But where else could she go?
Now she lived with her golden retriever in a tiny apartment in a not-great urban neighborhood, working 60 hours a week at a chain bookstore, where she “assisted” the manager, i.e., managed the store, booked the readings, supervised the staff, and ran the book club while the manager read proofs. On her day off, she and her dog walked for miles around the neighborhood.
She spent a lot of time at a neighborhood cafe.
“Sit, Marlowe.” She perched on a chair at my table, with the dog adoringly lolling at her feet. The sign said NO DOGS, but the servers made an exception for Marlowe, whom they called the “therapy dog.”
Lee Ann looked pale. “Marlowe is acting weird. I’m never home.”
“He seems happy.”
“He eats the furniture. The arm of a chair is gone. It’s gone!”
“No! He couldn’t eat a chair arm.”
“Well, he bit it off. Something.”
“I could dog-sit occasionally if it would help. We have cats, but Marlowe could stay in the dining room,” We lived in a huge apartment in a building across the street – the right side of the street, if I may say – though eventually we would have to leave. On the day I had to step over a passed-out john in the hall we began to make plans to move.
“Would you mind looking after Marlowe tonight? I have to lead the book club, but it only lasts an hour. I would rush back! We’re talking about Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night ofWhite Chickens. It won’t be a long discussion,”
“I loved that book! What a great choice.”
“Hardly anyone comes. There will be a neurosurgeon and three housewives. That’s all!”
“At that huge store?”
And then her face turned light green and she threw up her croissant. Ugh! Then she threw up again. And I agreed to lead the group that night, because she was terrified she’d lose her job.
That night a friend accompanied me to the book group. I was begging her to be my co-leader when the neurosurgeon arrived.
“He’s hellaciously handsome!” she whispered. “Yes, I WILL be the co-leader.”
It was the usual book group, with coffee, cookies, a few brilliant remarks, much encouragement from me, and several digressions about a sale at Younkers. The neurosurgeon praised Goldman’s style, humor, vivid characters, and handed out Xerox copies of a diagram of the structure of the book. I may have looked at the diagram upside down, but was impressed he’d done it at all.
One of the housewives had a meltdown. “I had to get out of the house! I had to get away from my family! I haven’t had time to read in a year.”
“You could go read in the bookstore cafe if you’d like,” I suggested
How many people have my super-powers saved today, I wondered with a bit of cynicism? Lee Ann; the book group; the housewife who never got a chance to read… But why did I always try to fix things?
Eventually Lou Ann inherited some money and moved away. And we moved from one bad neighborhood to another until the bus stop was so full of drug-users that I couldn’t take mass transit and we had to reconsider our options.
Still, while the first neighborhood lasted, it was a great, mellow place to live. Why does everything good get ruined? It’s the age, as the narrator of Thomas McGuane’s Panama says.
