The Neighbors Are All Leaving Now

The neighbors are all leaving now. Some just across town, to Senior Living; some to quieter country places; some (more and more, alarmingly too many) for that final “dirt nap,” as a mortician friend piquantly put it years ago, back when we were still young enough to make light of things like that. We’re not that young anymore. No, definitely not that young now – if we ever really were.

Back then, we were the new guys on the block, and the new gay guys to boot, not making a proclamation about it, but not denying it either. There was no suggestion that we were cousins, brothers or just roommates at a time when there was still just a little wariness about households like ours, outside the gay ghetto. (Are those times gone by now, do we suppose?)

The neighbors had already been in place for decades. They’d known each other – not well, perhaps, but well enough to say Hello, send Christmas cards (or Hanukkah cards for one or two), comment on the weather and talk superficial politics – all pretty much agreeing on politics then. They’d known each other through child rearing, career climbing, divorce for some, and prosperous white entitled heterosexual middle age for all. No blame, no shame intended. It was just the way of their world then.  My mantra has always been, “CHANGE BAD!” And I think back then (only back then?) most of my neighbors would have agreed.

It was a decade before the ice broke in our direction, before any of the neighbors had more than a superficial Hello for us. I’m not saying it was their issue anymore than ours. Learning how to relate as a gay couple out of the gay ghetto, in a neighborhood we intended to inhabit for the long haul, was on us too, not just them. But finally, whoever did the learning, the ice did break, and we became “the boys,” even though we were well over 40 by then. But by comparison …

That was long ago now. There were a couple of decades of neighborly cordiality; occasional house tours when kitchens had been remodeled, or gardens relandscaped, or rugs brought back from exotic markets in North Africa or one of the “stans;” the occasional condolence card when someone occasionally, at that point, died. The dear lady behind us had been born in 1910, after all.

But now, the neighbor exodus, whatever the reason, whatever the destination, is in full force – almost finished, in fact, since we’re all that’s left of that earlier population. New people have filled the houses, or soon will – the long standing houses, or the ones that have replaced them.  Seen from our window now, it’s a neighborhood whose transition has almost fully happened – will be done as soon as we make ours. Soon, I suspect, to the new neighbors we’ll be “those old gray gentlemen someone really should check on. Do you suppose they’re still alive?”

It’s a role we never anticipated for ourselves – even though we had a mentor in those early decades – the “old woman no one ever sees,” three doors down the block. The one we literally never did see in all those years, whose upstairs window was always open a crack, and whose roof moldered away to almost nothing. And then one day we saw not her, but her things – treasures, no doubt, to her – heaped into a dumpster in the yard. She’s gone, her things are gone, even her house is gone, replaced by a new one (not moldering, but historyless), lived in by neighbors we’ve never met. They haven’t yet paid their decade of icy dues to be accepted in the neighborhood – though perhaps they haven’t realized it, or don’t care.

It’s a cliché to ask, “How did it happen so fast?” The neighborhood is changing. All neighborhoods always are, I suppose, though sometimes it’s possible for us to fool ourselves into thinking that they’re not. And there’s some good in that, I suppose – might as well hope there is, since it’s going to happen anyway. But now that we’re the next change on the schedule, now that it’s almost time for someone to reserve the dumpster for our things – our treasures – now that the dirt nap has transitioned from macabre joke to a near reality, and for us, a certain phrase keeps coming into my mind, and I can’t deny it: “Change Bad!”