Block parties are popular in Chicago’s summer; the city will loan you a free bounce house for yours if you ask. But the block where Kat and I live had not held such a party, not that anyone can remember, up until this past September. That was when our neighbors decided to change things for the better. The party we organized together was late in the season, and it drizzled a bit. But we put some garbage bags on the PA speakers and took shelter in the great fortune of our street’s tree canopy. The trees are our neighbors too. We took care of each other, and we went on.
That block party will be a good memory for a long time. It was a great success, and we met almost everyone who lives within a stone’s throw of us, and some new friends who don’t. I took photos on my little thermal-paper toy camera and handed the printouts out to kids who were playing together. We had an excess of good food and almost enough good dogs. And now when I walk our own good dog, and see someone from across the street, I can put a name to a face, and we can trade smiles that mean something more than politeness.
Less than three weeks later, masked federal agents abducted the first of their confirmed victims from the streets of Rogers Park. My mother was here visiting us. Some of my neighbors who were disappeared by the secret police were leaving the same church she attended. Some of them were trying to take their children to or from the nearby elementary school.
There has been excellent journalism showing that the kinds of people targeted in this way lacked arrest records, and had their documents, and were crucial parts of their communities. The fucking George W. Bush Center published an article this very year about how immigration benefits us all, but the truth is that people were targeted for their appearance, not their immigration status. And also: even if every one of the disappeared were an undocumented and solitary migrant with a history of arrests who took more from public resources than they returned, they would still be my neighbors. Evil committed against them is evil done to me and mine.
We wear plastic whistles when we go for walks these days. We got them from the bright warm queer coffee shop, or the physical therapist’s office, or the corner store, or the rally, or the evening crammed together in a restaurant. When we look across the street and see matching bright nylon strings looped around each other’s necks, we smile and nod, and it means much more than politeness. The smiles are tight, but they are sincere. Some say the moment of most acute terror here may have passed with the first touch of winter, at least for those of us not already detained or separated. I remain wary with pain in my heart. I have neighbors in Asheville, and Charlotte, and Baltimore, and Portland too.
I moved a lot, when I lived in Portland: seven times in eleven years. I had the great fortune of many friends, but I didn’t get to know many of my neighbors. I often wanted to connect with them, but I was lacking in tools or time to do so, and then before long I’d be on to a different part of town. Now I live in the house I hope to keep until I can no longer climb its steps. I want the same roots the trees that line our street have grown. Yesterday I took care of an anxious dog from next door while his people were away, and when they came home they gave us a tub of beans and rice that I’m thinking of with hunger right now.
I lived decades with the terrible privilege of innocence to the way life proceeds under military enforcement. But proceed it does, for most of us. We trade favors and drink coffee. We hug each other tight at parties. We do the laundry and we watch the crosswalks. We keep our eyes up and our ears open. And when we hear the danger coming, we run toward it, not away.
The long, deep myth of the city as center and source of violence is so strange to me. Neighborhoods, even those where heat leads to suffering among missing trees, are places where people cooperate. Cities are nothing if not neighborhoods cooperating with each other. All the many benefits they offer are born of the choice to get along and share. I grew up in suburbs, a kind of place structured by a desire to be apart from other people. I mean no unkindness to my suburban loved ones when I make this generalization. But suburbs were built because people wanted to move away; cities like Chicago, for all their flaws and failures, are places people move to. The choice of a city is the choice to be close to people you don’t yet know.
On the weekend before Mom came to visit our home, Kat and I took the city light rail line to Chicago’s train station, and thereby went to Minneapolis to visit friends we have dearly missed. On the train back home I read through all of Sophie’s beautiful new book Kin. If you click on only one link from this blog post, it should be that one. I wish I could just read it aloud to all my loved ones, even the parts where Kat and I are mentioned. The book is so moving, and by that I mean I felt it move me to action. The subtitle of Kin is “the future of family.” It is a future I believe in, and one I am trying in my small way to make our present too.
When Mom saw an article about how her fellow parishioners here had been abducted, she sent the link to our relatives, and she wrote: “We took Communion together. They are my family.” It made my chest ache, and it made me so grateful that my family of origin has a mother who sees things clearly.
I started writing this post because I wanted you, reading it, to take it as a sign to reach out to people where you live. It’s the only way to make strangers into neighbors and neighbors into friends. It is work I am still doing, and I have found it worth the effort many times over. I hope your neighbors don’t suck; I know some do. But even then there are more people in the next building down, and if you learn each other’s names, you can bring them cookies and trade numbers if you want to learn to like each other more.
We will only get through the worst together with those around us. Caring for each other is what makes us human, in a biological sense: prosocial behavior is the primary survival trait of our species. But it’s also the trait that brings us good dogs and pot luck and bounce houses on summer streets. I called them free bounce houses, but of course the reality is that everyone here pays for each other’s parties, just a little bit. I wish I could choose to pay for kids in bounce houses instead of in cages. I wish I could pay for my neighbors’ meals instead of tear gas. I wish that instead of paying people to set fire to our world, I could choose to keep the people around me warm.
It’s hard enough getting through a Chicago winter. It’s hard enough to feel one’s body aging, and to lose people by way of time and misfortune. It’s hard enough just doing the laundry and watching the crosswalks. It’s hard enough to care for the small and vulnerable in a family while budgeting time and money and effort to maintain oneself. It’s hard enough that work takes more and more from us, that trees and pets and people get sick, that the hours and the days slip from our grasp. It’s hard enough that things fall apart even with effort to keep them together.
Nobody needs cruelty and evil to make things harder on all of us, not even those who enact it. What we need is each other. We go on.
