[sailaway21]

I travel about quite a bit in my job, generally meeting three new families in a day if not more. It often is necessary fro me to run a garden hose from their neighbor's house over to their's if I cannot get them back in water that day, assuming that their neighbor lives close enough to them. What amazes me is that many of these people, in some neighborhoods well over fifty percent, do not know each other!

Oh, they might vaguely remember the wife or husband's first name but little beyond that. It's for sure they don't know what the neighbor does, his kid's names, or any of the things we used to take for granted that we knew about our neighbors. They certainly hadn't borrowed a cup of sugar from them!

In some cases, this leads to a reluctance to impose upon them by "borrowing" water. I usually have to make a significant effort to overcome this reluctance to impose and I'm not always successful. In most cases, I end up asking the customer if it'd be better if I went over with them and did the talking. They almost always look at me with an expression of great relief and fall in line astern as I head next door. Once I make my request to the neighbor I usually then leave them to chat a bit which many do, apparently for the first time in a lot of cases. Sometimes, I have to ask if I can drive my large and heavy well rig across their yard to gain access to their neighbor's well and this seems to rarely be an imposition as long as the neighbor is willing to repair the yard damage.

It's quite hilarious sometimes. I vividly recall the time the homosexual couple was dead certain that the fascist, lawn fanatic, close-minded bigot next door would not allow me to drive across his lawn to get at their well. This would have resulted in their having to remove three forty foot tall blue spruce trees from their yard to access it. The neighbor opened his door and I soon deduced the problem. One could tell from his dress that he was either Mormon or some other notedly conservative religious group as he was in tie and shirtsleeves at ten o'clock at night. Maybe he just like dressing like it was still 1955! We didn't get into that and he immediately allowed as how it'd be just fine although he had an in-ground sprinkler system he was concerned about and would be gone the following morning. I was worried about damaging it as well but then he said that he'd mark it for more and promptly went to the garage and brought out some little utility service type flags and a flashlight, and immediately began searching for the sprinkler heads! One half of the customer couple continued to berate the fellow and his wife, on our trip back to their house, for being difficult and some other vaguely undesirable social things. I resisted the urge to adjust his thinking with a 14" pipe wrench somehow! Some people just don't know when to be grateful and call it good.

What causes this phenomena? I'm sure it's a combination of many things including the fact that both individuals in most marriages now work full time and most communities are bedroom communities as a result. But one would think that the presence of kids would ameliorate that. It doesn't seem to because, more and more, the kids are friends not with the neighborhood kids but the kids they know at dance school, soccer practice, or the fourteen other outside the home activities they're involved in. And the neighbors are, well, neighbors right? As in right next door.

My theory is that the estrangement is due to technology. Specifically, air-conditioning. That kids today are less active and engage in more indoor activities no doubt contributes but I think the a/c just makes that more easy to isolate themselves in. Even lake cottage people do not get to know their new neighbors as cottages are more and more buttoned up with the a/c running, just like the houses in town.

What does a/c have to do with not knowing your neighbor? A/C has only really been around since the mid-1970's in anything but the most upscale houses. In the upper midwest even those million dollar homes from the 1960's didn't have it. Everybody opened a window or six. And that was the clue that put me on the track. The lake properties first triggered the thought. Around the lakes everyone had all the windows open to beat the heat and the cottages are frequently built very close to each other. "Quiet time" used to start around ten o'clock. Kids were all out past ten o'clock in the summer but they had to pipe down with the noise. If they slipped up in that regard, Mr. Smith would just call quietly out the window saying, "ten o'clock" and everyone knew what he meant.

And Mr. Smith knew the kids all by their voices. He knew if it was Johnny or Joey doing the yelling and if they did not decease, Johnny or Joey's parent swere going to know as well. Of course, if Johnny was the one who'd just fell out of the tree and broken his arm, Mr. Smith probably heard the thud or the scream and was the first one there. By the time that Johnny's parents knew something was amiss he was probably already in a car and headed to the hospital. Chances were pretty good that Mr. Smith owed Johnny's parents a cup of sugar, too!

I'm going to guess that seventy percent of the houses I now see never open their windows anymore. People go right from heating season into A/C season, sometimes within the same day! I suppose that's fine if they can afford it but there are sociological costs to it that I, nor anyone else, never considered to such a marvelous advance as household climate control.

What all this has to do with politics is that, even though you suspect your neighbor of being a right-wing unreconstructed Nazi who wants to destroy your rights as a practicing homosexual, you really don't know a damn thing about him until you open up the window and ask him if he wants some help starting that lawnmower. And once we get to know our neighbors we find that our common interests far overshadow our differences.