Peter Lovenheim

Do you know your neighbors? How well? Have you ever been inside their homes? If you needed help at 4 AM, could you call them? On the author's suburban street, although he has lived there for decades, he realizes how little connection he has with his own neighbors and sets out to remedy that. One method is for him to sleep over at his neighbor's homes. Another is to accompany the mailman and newspaper delivery man on their routes. He knocks on doors, asks for introductions, and ultimately connects who he meets with one another. Spurred by a terrible crime that occurred down the street, Peter Lovenheim is determined to overcome the barriers that architecture and isolation have created.… (altro)

"Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
Say, who are the people in your neighborhood?
The people that you meet each day."
from Sesame Street

As regular readers of this blog know, our family is in the process of moving. So far, we've visited approximately a dozen houses in various neighborhoods, all of which look nice enough.

With moving, I'm always a bit apprehensive about what types of neighbors we're going to get. (I suppose everyone is, to a degree.) You see, growing up, my family lived next door to a batshit crazy woman who often referred to me as "monkey-faced," who often shrieked that we needed to turn the wind around because it was blowing into her yard, and who would take Poncho (her annoying as hell Chihuahua) for strolls in our fenced in backyard.

The police were called on numerous occasions (we still have the meticulous log my father kept of every incident; it's considered a family heirloom at this point), my brother and I were on a first-name basis with all the sergeants and the zoning officer (or whomever is in charge of things like putting up fences), and I'm not exaggerating when I say that it is a miracle nobody was killed. (Although it wouldn't surprise me if the constant stress of living next door to this witch was a factor in my father's death at 44.)

But despite this wackadoo next door, ours was a neighborhood where we knew one another. Across the street there was the elderly couple who signed birthday cards to me as "Grandma and Grandpa Yeager" and who consoled my frantic, hysterical mother when I once went missing for several excruciating hours (the result of some parental-child miscommunication rather than foul play). Next door, there was the socialite with the Doberman Pincher and whose shore home was in the same condo as my friend Meghan's. And across from her lived the family of our trusty babysitters.

So it was with all this in mind that I picked up Peter Lovenheim's memoir In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover At a Time.

Sleepover doesn't refer to, say, Peter Lovenheim's daughter spending the night at a friend's house nearby. No. It refers to his sleeping over at his neighbors' homes, as an adult. As in, striking up a conversation or two with a neighbor only known somewhat casually, mentioning that he was writing a book on neighborhoods and building community, and then asking to sleep over as a way to get to know them better.

Now. If you know my husband in real life, you can probably imagine his reaction when I told him the premise of this book. He was, quite simply, aghast. There's no way this would happen in our house today. And indeed, when approached by Lovenheim with this notion of having a sleepover, several of his neighbors turned him down flat. (In addition to sleeping over for one night, Lovenheim also accompanied his neighbors - as well as his mailman and his newspaper delivery guy - throughout their entire day, coming along on their visits to the local Y, watching them as they siesta'ed during the noon hours, tagging along to workplaces and business meetings ... you name it.)

It doesn't take much to realize that the main (and ironic) reason that The Husband and I would never consider having one of our adult neighbors sleep overnight is because we simply don't know who the hell they are. I know the names of the people immediately next door and their kids. And I know what my other neighbor does for a living (thanks to the FBI showing up at my door) but I'll be damned if I know the guy's name. The always-attired-in-New-York-Yankees-apparel guy who walks his white poodle? No clue. The single dad with the two girls, two doors down? Dunno. The people two doors down on the other side who moved in a few weeks ago who I think are from Pittsburgh, where we're moving to? I can tell you what they bought the house for (thanks to my studious perusal of the local real estate listings) but we have yet to say hello.

From his descriptions in his book, Peter Lovenheim's neighborhood is similar to the one I'm leaving in regard to interactions between residents. And unless you are my friend W. who lives in a development with real-live coffee klatsches happening monthly or author Rachel Simon, who writes lovingly of her neighborhood in her own memoir, The House on Teacher's Lane, I'm betting it is similar to yours, too.

In Peter Lovenheim's case, it takes a tragedy - the murder-suicide of a husband and wife living several doors down - to make him contemplate how things might have been different if the wife didn't feel so isolated, if she had a safe place to go in the throes of domestic violence, if someone had noticed something amiss or felt comfortable in giving her the name of a local shelter - if they knew it. (Ironically, several such things did happen after the tragedy; neighbors offered grieving family members their spare bedrooms while making funeral arrangements, people brought food, and in the immediate hours the young children of the couple were cared for by - you guessed it - a neighbor.)

In the Neighborhood, then, becomes Lovenheim's memoir about his quest to get to know the people on his street. While chronicling these encounters, Lovenheim gives his reader an often funny and introspective glimpse into the culture of community, about the various reasons why we are so content to "live as strangers," and how and why this dynamic evolved from a time when it was commonplace for neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar from one another.

There are also heartbreaking moments too - such as when Lovenheim learns how his octogenarian next door neighbor Lou needed to call a daughter living 20 minutes away when he found himself temporarily immobile. Or when Grace (a woman who power-walked daily through Peter's neighborhood for 40 years) stumbled, sprained her ankle, and crawled on her hands and knees to the other side of the wide, tree-lined road ... without a soul noticing.

Through what is an easy read, you feel like you get to know Peter's neighbors - and start thinking more about your own - which, I suppose, is kind of the point. You also get the sense that writing this book was a bit cathartic for him. (Some points are repeated more than a few times, and there was a little too much navel-gazing about his personal life, but these are just minor quibbles I have.) Most of the time, Peter comes across as a genuinely nice and pleasant guy, someone who anyone would be pleased to have as a neighbor.

Yeah, even me.
… (altro)

The author decides to follow a calf through the meat process, 'from conception to consumption". He starts by watching a bull be "collected", and the the cow inseminated, and ends with the slaughterhouse. In the meantime, over a two year period, the author struggles with moral and ethical dilemmas, gets to know people in the business, and finds out a lot more than perhaps he bargained for. Overall, a good solid book and easy to read, but the author violates one of the cardinal rules of journalism - he gets involved with the people he's writing about. He understand this, obviously, because he mentions several times how wrong it is of him to get involved with the calves he has bought, but he doesn't seem to spot that his objectivity might be a bit impaired by his friendship with the humans. He also has the unfortunate habit of looking at the world a bit more simplistically than is ideal, while thinking he's looking at it realistically. He commits what I consider a major (and potentially) dangerous blunder of naivete, when he talks with a ruthless, high-powered business man and when he realizes the guy has a picture of his grandkid on his desk, suddenly assumes he must be a nice guy because he has grandkids. For some reason, we've gotten into the unfortunate habit in this country of thinking that ruthless, heartless businessmen will also be friendless, loveless Scrooges or Mr. Potters. This also has the unfortunate side affect of rendering the shy loner a scary individual, when nothing may be further from the truth. He also deals with his subject way too superficially; he raises a lot of issues, but misses the real question on many of them, such as the use of bovine growth hormone in milk cows, and he totally drops the ball in the routine use of antibiotics in cow feed. This could be because he doesn't consult any biologists other than a farm vet, and he doesn't consult any books except industry written and sponsored books. As a result, he has written a book that, rather than being an expose or a solid non-fiction book, is only rendered grittier than Charlotte's Web by the descriptions of some fairly brutal practices. These he assumes must be done because the people doing them say they are necessary. This weakens the book considerably, as there is absolutely no discussion of environmental issues or even really human health issues, and the animal health issues are dealt with only superficially. He does come to a conclusion that is biologically accurate in reference to whether humans need to eat meat, but there were some encounters through the course of it that just left me cold. In addition, his continual insistence on how hard the farmers work (something I don't doubt, since I was raised on a farm myself, and my grandfather was a dairy farmer) often came off sounding like an accusation that the rest of the world doesn't work. That is not true, and many of his assumptions for that reason sound extremely insulting. Overall, a decent introduction to the meat industry for people who don't want to have to work too hard, but there are much better sources out there.… (altro)