In Praise of Sidewalks, Yards, Squares, Parks - OR - American Alienation

February 24, 2011

When I lived in small-town Spain, my daughter Cecilia and I would walk to school every day. Our walk would often take us past Buba, our favorite English bulldog tied up outside the café up the street while his owners had a coffee. We always looked forward to seeing Buba, and Cecilia carried dog treats in her backpack just in case he was there. Sometimes we offered to walk our downstairs neighbors’ dog, Bono, a beautiful golden lab, so our neighbors and their newborn baby could sleep in, and then Bono and Buba, neighborhood friends, could frolic a bit before we continued on.

We would go past the pine grove on the avenue where Cecilia’s school was. It was interspersed with mulberry trees where we would pick leaves every spring and early summer to feed her silkworms before they spun their cocoons. We would walk by the apartment building where her friend Cristina and her mother were usually waiting for us, playing on the swings outside. We walked with them until Cristina’s mother became heavily pregnant with her second child; then her mother stayed home and Cristina walked the rest of the way with us. We’d pass by our friend Roya’s house and check to see if we got a glimpse of her through the geraniums in her window boxes, and wave if we did. My daughter would always walk atop the brick wall on the edge of a hilly park, loving the fact that she was as tall as me; where the stairs interrupted the wall, she would pretend that she was flying as I carried her across… until she got too big for that. After it rained, the wall was always covered with slugs that had surfaced to avoid suffocating in the wet soil. We always stopped to examine them, tracing their slime paths back into the grass.

We would reach school, and all the parents and kids would be milling about in the yard behind school, grouping together in a sometimes cliquish, sometimes purposeful way – discussing after-school plans, lunchtime arrangements, soccer games coming up, the festival last weekend. The fence would open, the kids would pour in and the parents would then retire to the cafés nearby, each group in its favorite, to have a cup of coffee, a café con leche for some, a cortado for me, and for others a café solo strong enough to jumpstart any day. We’d talk about anything and everything –family, business, city politics, neighbors, job searches, health, money, kids, husband, wife, parents, siblings. The stuff of life. Around 15 minutes of catching up, and then we all dispersed to our homes or jobs, sometimes stopping at the vegetable stand, fishmonger’s or bakery on the way home to pick up the fresh food for the day.

After school, we’d all gather outside school again, and when the children were young, before they got involved in after-school activities, we would hang around the playground outside the school while the kids ran around, splashed in the fountain and ensuing mud, created secret worlds in the bushes, kicked around the soccer ball, played in the sand, and hurled themselves down the slide.

We were slowly weaving the fabric of a community, day by day, in 15-minute increments, learning about each other and becoming a unified group with shared interests: our children, our families, our school, and our town.

On the weekends, we would go to the park. We’d always bring some gear – roller skates, a scooter, or a bike, and sometimes some plastic horses or toys to play with in the grass. We went alone, but we never ended up alone. You never knew who you’d run into, but there was always someone at the park, a neighbor, maybe a classmate, or perhaps a new friend. As my daughter went off to play with them – after a certain age I didn’t even keep an eye on her because in Spain, kids are everyone’s responsibility, they’re a community treasure that everyone keeps watch over, at least in our town – I would talk to the parents. At first the talk was superficial, about the weather (mostly gorgeous), the school, the town, the park maintenance (always a disgrace), local elections (thieves!), or common acquaintances, but after a few meetings the topics went further; we talked about our history, backgrounds, opinions, and feelings. Soon we would agree to meet at the park again, and playing turned into picnics, and picnics turned into outings for a day, and all of this gradually turned into friendship. We were weaving community, slowly but surely, with no particular goal in mind, no agenda, just time spent together whenever we could.

I came back to the U.S. a year and a half ago with my then-10-year-old daughter. The first year she went to a small, private school. There were no buses. Before school, the parents brought the kids, got out of the car with them, and walked them into the school when the weather was bad and onto the playground in good weather. We greeted the playground monitors, most of them fellow parents, stopped and chatted a bit, maybe went inside to talk to the teacher or the principal, and then dispersed. In the afternoons, we would also get out of the car, find our kids indoors or out, and when the weather was nice many parents, myself included, would stay at the playground sitting at the picnic table watching our children running wild through the forest or soccer field, clambering up the jungle gym, building forts with stray boards, chatting with each other, finding common ground, and forging friendships. And weaving community. I still have lasting friends from that one year, and so does Cecilia.

She now goes to a big public school, much like her school in Spain. She loves it; she plays on the basketball team and is on the yearbook committee. She fits right in. She’s flourishing. Her grades are great. She started in August, so it’s been six months. Every morning, I drive her to school; she could take the bus, but since I can drive her I do. The other day, I saw a bus leave the school parking lot at 3:20, stop half a block away, and let off one of Cecilia’s friends. “Why does she take the bus?” I asked my daughter.  “No one is allowed to walk to school,” she answered me matter-of-factly. There are no sidewalks, so walking is dangerous, even for a child that lives a two-minute walk away. So there are no opportunities for chance encounters, no opportunities to discover slugs, dogs, and neighbors along the way, and no opportunities to take that ten or fifteen minutes, for those fortunate enough to live close to school or wherever they’re going, to just talk, to come together with no particular agenda, no computer, games, or cell phones in the way, to look up in the trees and sky or down to the ground and see what the world is revealing to us today.

Before living here my daughter, being a European kid, had never played softball, but now she wants to try. This past summer we would go to the park, a beautiful park in our town, spacious and green, with a lake and baseball diamonds. Most days, we were the only ones there. We looked around, trying to spot someone else, someone to sidle over to, to comment on the day with. You know, a bit of social intercourse. Yet we rarely saw anyone. Softball isn’t my thing, so after around 20 minutes we both got bored and left. Where was everyone? Why do we have these beautiful parks if not to inhabit them fully? And forge community, build togetherness. The only time I’ve seen the parks in this town occupied is for organized events: a Boy Scouts meet, a town-wide Easter egg hunt, but no one seems to hang out in the park, a major past-time in Spain. Where do people hang out? I guess in their spacious houses with spacious yards, yet I sense that something is lost with this lack of collective, public, unscheduled, spontaneous life.

As I drive my daughter to school in the mornings, I turn onto the access road, wait in line in the car, drop her off at the door and drive off. If I wanted to get out, there would be nowhere to go. In the six months she has attended this school, I have not met a single parent by chance, just by standing next to each other and starting a conversation. The few parents I do know, I already knew from elsewhere. Instead of being able to get out of the car, walk up, wait, make conversation as we mill about waiting for the kids to come out, there is a solemn, anonymous procession of cars coming to spirit the children away, while on the other side of school a battalion of yellow school buses whisks away the kids whose parents can’t pick them up, and those who could walk home but aren’t allowed to.

The only chances I have to meet someone at my daughter’s new school are PTA meetings, but I am a single parent, and getting away in the evening to leave my daughter by herself after a full day’s work is not particularly appealing, or often even feasible. All the chances to weave a community are formal and organized. I have to join something – a club, a church, a team. There is no chance for natural, spontaneous interaction, no public spaces of convergence, no informal day-to-day connection that helps weave community in the most natural of ways, no chance for kids to stay afterwards and play on the playground as parents mingle and gradually build ties, no chance to even walk to school and discover the world and discuss random topics. The sidewalks are set aside for ‘walks’, not for walking to run errands or accomplish daily routines, and if we go to the park it is empty, devoid of life, everyone hunkered down in their huge cars, well-appointed homes, and vast yards.