Our American Neighborhood

One of the first presents I bought our newborn daughter was a Radio Flyer wagon, red, of course, with fenced rails that came off if you needed them to. We loved those fences, not so much because they made good neighbors, but because when our daughter became old enough to ride in that wagon, they kept her from falling out.

Kept her safe.

The right fences do that, of course, and our house sat between two others, so that one border had a wrought iron fence protecting us all, and the other had a beaten up wooden fence because those neighbors were missionaries and rented their house out to various young couples or students. One set of these students used to do Saturday night comedy sketches. Shining faces that we would never have noticed otherwise showed up on these evenings, and toward the beginning, the renters invited my wife and me over. We made no promises, and so on that first comedy night, we sat in our own backyard, sipping our beer, and rocking our baby.

And yet, they weren’t the strangest neighbors to live there.

Back in those wagon days when our little girl was two or three, the family who moved in was a couple with five little kids, ages ranging from infant to ten-year old. I remember their names, these kids, still: Ian, Trevor, Colin, Stanislaus, and Kylie. Stanislaus was too little to ride in the wagon, but I pulled the others by turn along with our little Pari around our neighborhood block, over and over, in sunny weather, and in cold. The neighbor kids never said a word on these rides, but Kylie, the oldest, would pick her little brothers up, set them in the wagon, and smile the whole way.

Their mother was friendly enough and had no problem with my caring for her kids on these long and sometimes dwindling afternoons. Her husband was a less frequent sight. We heard that he worked for his church, but where that church was and what he did there, we never knew.

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