Social experiment: Get to know the neighbors
Interesting column by Peter Lovenheim in the LA Times:
When I was growing up in upstate New York in the late 1950s and ’60s, people didn’t exercise in public the way they do now. You didn’t see adults jogging, biking or power-walking on the street.
Except one. Nearly every day, a middle-aged woman of slight build walked rapidly through our suburban neighborhood, usually with her head down. No one knew her name, so we called her the Walker. She usually wore a simple blue or yellow dress, if memory serves, and when it rained she would wear a clear plastic raincoat with a hood pulled over her head. In the winter I recall a long, cloth coat, also with a hood; in driving snow she’d cover her face with a scarf.
Forty years later, when I’d moved with my wife and children back to what had been my parents’ home, I was amazed to see the same woman still walking through the neighborhood.
Resolved, finally, to meet her, I approached her one afternoon in 2003.
“Excuse me, ” I began. “I’ve lived on this street a long time and have always noticed you walking.”
Up close, she looked older, smaller and frailer than I had imagined.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been walking here a long time.”
Her voice was shaky, but she spoke with a clear diction. She said she’d walked in the neighborhood almost every day since 1960.
“You’ve walked on our street every day for more than 40 years?” I asked.
“I didn’t miss many,” she said, smiling.
“In just one more year, I’ll be 90,” she added.
Her name was Grace Field.
In answer to my question, Grace said that in all the years she’d been at it, few people had stopped to speak with her.
I was, at the time, writing a book about how Americans live as neighbors and asked Grace if she’d be willing to talk with me about that. She agreed, and a few days later, I met her at her home. It turned out she lived in an apartment nearby. She’d never married, lived alone and walked each day, she said, for exercise.
Among the things I learned about Grace was that as a young woman she had studied at the Juilliard School and was an accomplished harpist and pianist.
What a waste, I thought; if only we’d gotten to know her, Grace might have made an interesting friend. Maybe she even could have given music lessons to children in the neighborhood.
I had not been particularly interested in neighborhoods until about 10 years ago when a tragedy occurred on my street: One evening, . . .
