For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I went from door to door of every house in our neighborhood. We didn’t ring doorbells and we didn’t come home with bags of candy. But it was “trick or treat” just the same because, well, neighborhoods can be scary and fun all at the same time.
It was Monday afternoon and we were distributing flyers inviting folks to a meeting on Saturday morning. There’s been quite a dust up in Garland in recent weeks over the future of Central Park, which borders our neighborhood. There are different factions that have different desires for the park, and our neighborhood has been left in the dark until recently.
City staff asked for the meeting with our Embree neighborhood, and I was their contact since I am the president of the neighborhood association. That in itself is a scary prospect for me, because as we say at our house, “Jeff doesn’t like people.” It’s my exaggerated way of acknowledging my introversion. I also don’t like conflict, and there’s been plenty of that floating on the wind.
Still, LeAnn and I set out on foot Monday afternoon to distribute flyers to all 140 houses in Embree. Our neighborhood is a remnant of the town of Embree that was founded in 1886 and then merged with Duck Creek in 1891 to form the new town of Garland. We have houses built in the 1800s and pretty much every decade since then. Embree looks like a small town rather than a modern suburb.
In some of the chatter about Central Park our neighborhood has been described as a bunch of “low-income retirees,” but that is not true at all. We do have retirees, and we do have people of lower income. But we also have young people and middle agers, university administrators and landscapers, Ph.D. scholars and mechanics, writers and truck drivers, dental hygienists and woodcarvers, artists and accountants. We are black, white and brown. We have people living in the house they grew up in, and newcomers like ourselves.
So through this diverse neighborhood we walked, taping flyers to doors and mailboxes, being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible but also not avoiding encounters as they came. Such as the man who shared the latest developments in his garden, or the young woman who gave an update on her fight with cancer. A couple working in their garage who I’d never seen before looked at the flyer skeptically and asked, “Are you out politicking?” The answer was, “No.” Another man came out into the yard to meet us and thank us for the invitation. A neighbor we know stopped in his truck and jokingly asked LeAnn if she was out “walking the streets,” and another wished out loud that the city would just leave us alone.
Most of the houses were quiet at four in the afternoon, but that didn’t stop me from tiptoeing across wooden porches so as not to draw any attention. Especially a few houses of an age and condition where it looks like there might be a Boo Radley just inside the screen door. But just like in “To Kill A Mockingbird,” we’ve discovered that some of the Boos in our neighborhood are the ones you want beside you when things get tough.
We’ve made the same trek for other meetings, and I gamely returned to a door with a sign peppered with blistering expletives telling the world they don’t want to be bothered by anyone for any reason. Except for this note at the bottom: “Girl Scout cookies? Yes.” The only house we avoided was one where, on previous occasions, the man emailed me or chased me down and said it was illegal to post notices in or near his mailbox.
Interestingly, many of the houses that I was hesitant to approach were decorated and ready for Halloween, which lets me know that my fear and hesitance is misplaced. I think the trick to getting along in a neighborhood like ours is to treat everyone with the same respect, dignity and trust that you would like in return. It’s true in Embree and Garland. And I bet it’s true in your neighborhood, too.