These are the people in your neighborhood

It was a beautiful New England fall day yesterday. Lots of folks were out and about in our neighborhood, and by the end of the day, I was reflecting on the riches living locally has brought to our life.

We started the day at shabbat services, a 20 minute walk from our place, where we reluctantly turned down a spontaneous lunch invitation from some friends, also walking distance from shul, because H and I had plans to have time together, just the two of us. After services, while we were out, H and I ran into a neighbor family we haven't seen in a little while and got to catch up a bit. Later that afternoon, after we were back home, a great friend of H's from daycare (the daycare that's about 5 blocks away) and her mom just dropped by to see if maybe H wanted to play. The neighbor whisked both kids off to the park while Angela and I finished getting ready for our outing that night. I then went to pick up H at the park, touched base with H's daycare friend and her dad, and ran into yet another family we know well and caught up with them a bit, letting them know if they wanted to hang out tomorrow they should touch base with Angela. H and I then walked along the bike path over to grandma's house in Davis square, running into two more families we know along the way, one family from the park, and one of Angela's co-workers and her daughter, who we know both from Angela's work, and from the fact that her daughter's daycare plays at the same park as our daughter's daycare, so our kids see each other several times a week. After dropping H off with her Grandma for their weekly sleepover (we know, we're spoiled), I waited in the square, listening to some great music for a few minutes while Angela got baby R settled with a sitter. When she caught up with me we hopped on the bus to a friend's wedding (which was delightful). This is a friend I met several years ago at grad school, and then we ended up on the same train home one day, and realized we lived in the same neighborhood.

Choosing to live with our work, daycare and religious community located right here in our neighborhood, choices we made because we didn't want to own a car, and choices that were not always easy to make, has provided such a rich sense of community. As we go about our days, we have so many opportunities to connect with friends from the many overlapping spheres of our life, simply by doing what we were going to do anyway. Some of the folks we ran into yesterday are close friends, the kind you really can call on in an emergency. Some are just friendly acquaintances. But even the less intimate connections, when they are so frequent, and so effortless to make, contribute to a deep sense of community and place. On our walk from the bus coming home from the wedding, I couldn't help but think that Mr. Rogers got it right.

My friends are your friends and your friends are my....

I've recently started noticing a place where our lifestyle doesn't completely mesh with the rest of the world, and it leads to some social awkwardness. This problem tends to show up when we meet new folks, who seem like they might be the kind of people we'd like to know, but then we find out where they live (say, in the burbs, accessible only by an hours commuter rail ride, if that), and we realize it's just not going to happen. We might manage to arrange one or two T-accessible meetups, but then then invites to their parties come...parties that theoretically we could get to...but it doesn't quite seem worth all of the work to get there...maybe because it would mean driving a zipcar on shabbat (we really would rather not do that), or dragging H on a hideously long train ride and having to beg a ride back into town way after bedtime. And besides, if we go, then we'll keep having to go. If we solidify a friendship with someone in the suburbs, we'll have to keep finding ways to get to the suburbs, or keep making excuses for why we can't get there.

I find that these days I just really don't want to put much time or energy into relationships with people who are far away, using our car-free definition of far. In fact, if I'm being honest, we only actually put energy into relationships with people who are walking distance away, even though we have good intentions of keeping up with our friends, say, a bus or bike-ride away.

From our end, in many ways this is just fine. We have plenty of wonderful friends in walking distance. Our social life is not drastically damaged by a fairly tight geographic boundary on friendship, but it does lead to awkwardness when navigating new friendships or even trying to maintain old ones. Much of the awkwardness is that while our practical friendship radius might be a couple of miles, most people who use cars regularly have a much wider friendship radius, maybe 5-10, or even 20 miles depending on their location, so we may be within their reasonable geographic circle, but they aren't within ours. I hate to see potentially good friendships wither away because we turned down one too many invitations, and sometimes wonder if a more honest approach might be better. On the other hand, we do have a few surprisingly good and valuable friendships that seem to be successfully maintained two or three meetings a year and the occasional e-mail, and we wouldn't have those if we just dismissed them out of hand immediately based on geography.