Where Are We? Who Are These People?

We are in the process of packing up for the move north for the summer, and apart from the anxiety that always grips me as I try to keep my mental and physical lists coordinated, I relish the peculiar spiritual weightlessness with which I float out of my here and now context.  It is perhaps an awful thing to say but I am never more at peace than when I am standing in the passageway that leads down   onto my departing plane, no longer 'here' and not yet 'there.'  And this is a guy who lived in the same house for the first sixteen years of his life, as opposed, for instance, to my wife, a Navy child, who spent that same period of time moving every two years, including the memorable experience of  being evacuated from Honolulu to San Diego after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Moving around is such an American thing to do.  I remember when I taught newly arrived immigrants up in the Bronx and I would recommend graduate school in Berkeley, for instance, and most of them would reply "But I couldn't leave my family."  My siblings and I live on both coasts, the south, the upper middle west, and have been together as a family only twice in the last sixty years, and I doubt we will ever          meet again. The first of these was to attend my mother's funeral, whose death cancelled the only motive for a get-together.   My  own children and grandchildren are as far flung as southern Florida, northern Canada. St. Louis, and New England, and every reunion is a major production, but I do enjoy them as they are sort of a rehearsal for my funeral with me still on the scene.  One moves into a neighborhood nowadays, but does not necessarily settle in socially.  After the parties of graduate school days in Cambridge, I lived with my second wife on a country lane in fake rural Connecticut in a 'dear little old house,' quite out of keeping with those of our stock broker neighbors.  They smiled if they passed by in their car, and that was fine and quite sufficient for us.  We lived in a cul de sac in Palo Alto with neighbors who were all in business or at least not education.  I remember one very drunken evening when one of them asked me how I could afford a house in that street on an assistant professor's salary, and another more intimate, but equally lubricated affair when the squarest couple on the block--to my mind, the most integrated--shocked me when they confessed through their tears how lonely they were after eight years residence, and how they had accepted a job abroad to escape it.  We moved back to Brookline, and we could see the neighbors eyeing us goyim and thinking "there goes the neighborhood."  Everyone smiled when out raking leaves but that was about it until one night a woman from a nearby house rang our doorbell and sought some kind of psychic shelter from whatever demons were going on over there.  She never explained, and she never had to, since we really did not know each other.  Chance meetings in the checkout lane at the nearby market was about the limit of our relationship.  Oddly enough, years later when I had moved back to Cambridge as a gay man, a woman from a nearby house came over in hysterics one evening with a long and quite unwelcome story of her marriage which thereafter never seemed to dim the luster of her smile and happy wave if we happened to be out getting into our cars at the same time.  When I first moved into that neighborhood everyone around me was a retired laboring class Irish Catholic.  Within ten years the entire group was dead, replaced by young marrieds with highly paid tech jobs whose concern was the pattern in the granite counters they were ordering for their kitchens.  The original neighbors had had loathsome barking dogs to warn them of intruders, the second set had shrill, shrieking, whining, children, who made me discover that getting older is not being able to tolerate the sound of children.  Now wherever I live is as a hotel where I know there are occupants of the other rooms because I sometimes hear a dim rumble from the television or the door to the corridor shutting.  Mutatis mutandis I see my neighbors taking out the trash, or getting the newspaper off the porch.  Who they are, I have no idea.  It's like walking onto the plane amid people.