Neighborhood Creeps 

    Certain books are so wonderful I can't bring myself to finish them. They "stimulate me" - as James Thurber once commented about a brilliant friend - "to a point beyond which I think I cannot go. "

    One book that affected me this way was Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Now there's brilliance for you! Who would have thought there was a book, let alone a best seller, in exalting the lowlife of a stream? 

    Her insights were extraordinary and I could only manage a couple of chapters before leaving the book behind in a friend's kitchen. Yet I mentally refer to those few chapters, those few insights, all the time. I think about Annie Dillard approximately l00 percent more than she thinks about me, and just the other day, while wandering up to the corner market for a quart of milk, I realized I was Annie Dillard. The only difference is that she hung around a creek while I hang around a neighborhood. I just never occurred to me that there was a book in it. 

    What does or doesn't occur to somebody explains why some people dine at the George V and other people are lucky to have jobs stuffing napkins into cafeteria dispensers. Or, as Annie Dillard commented in an article of Harper's Magazine, "I believe that wherever people seek power that the race is to the swift, that everybody is in the race, with varying and merited degrees of success or failure, and that reward is its own virtue." 

    Around here on the grassy fringe of the city, the "swift" and the "powerful" are already well in place downtown by nine in the morning. The Social Darwinists would find that those of us left behind - shaking out mops, tweaking off dead geranium leaves, and idly waiting to see what the day will bring forth - underscore their favorite thesis. 

    We are the lowlife; women, children, old men, delivery boys, retired alcoholics, an occasional creep. all of us, either by choice or circumstances, are out of the race. Or beneath it. 

    A neighborhood relates to downtown the way silt relates to a creek. Life tends to rush overhead, en route to someplace else. Yet power is not measured by the speed of forward propulsion alone, and having been part of this neighborhood'' ''silt" for a number of years now, I've come to appreciate a different kind of power. But I didn't see it for what it was until I'd hung around long enough. 

    "Tolerance" comes closest to describing it, "the capacity to endure or accept." Yet that's not quite it. There is an arched-eyebrow quality to that word which smacks of a Christian effort not to pass judgment for the sake of one's lily- white soul. 

    Truth to tell, people around here pass judgments upon each other all the time. Why, just the other day our dog nearly chewed up the local Brownie leader's rabbit and the air was full of judgments. Correct ones, I might add. But by and large we are gentle with each other, and while "little bunnies" routinely get chewed up by "big dogs" downtown, there is a different ethic at work in this cul-de-sac, and I say more power to it. 

    Living among us are three or four people who are here because they literally can't think of where else they could be. Human beings of the lowest cash value in any society, they are the tragically flawed who, through no fault of their own, were born without everything they needed - specifically, complete brains. 

    I think first of Harold, a nineteen-year-old boy who only gets off his bicycle to get back on it again. Harold thinks he is a fire engine and you can always hear him coming because he does an excellent siren sound as he whizzes down the street to another imaginary conflagration. As far as I can tell, Harold is perfectly content to be a fire engine for the rest of his life. 

    Every once in awhile he smacks into one of my children with his bike by accident, but I've never heard them complain about it. "It was Harold" they say with resignation, and they don't take the matter any further. 

    Robert is somewhat less fortunate than Harold because Robert is smarter. It is his particular cross to know, without being able to put his finger on why, that he is not like everybody else, and it troubles him. But Robert is a born helper, and he thinks he is a member of the local rescue squad - a fiction that the rescue squad has not thought fit to disabuse him of. At every traffic accident, house fire or downed electrical wire, Robert is there directing cars, warning children away and being efficient, which makes him feel a part of things. 

    One time however Robert felt a bit more a part of things than usual and he squared up to a pretty teenager down the block and asked her to a rescue squad dance. She could not, in conscience, say yes, and her no confirmed everything that secretly troubled Robert about himself. For several weeks he didn't' show up at any fires or accidents, and then he somehow resolved it all and was on the scene once more. 

    But the most frightening and least absorbent member of the neighborhood is John. It took my children a long time to get used to him with his unfixed stare, lolling tongue and trousers that may or may not be fastened on any given day. 

    John has no errands to perform, no fantasies he can communicate to others, and for the past five years, no father to take care of him. Every morning he wakes up to the fresh discovery that his daddy has died, and for the rest of the day he grieves over it. 

    Sometimes he grieves at the playground, other times he drags along the sidewalk, and on the morning I went up the street to buy a quart of milk, he was just sorrowing into the corner market. 

    Curly Edwards, the market manager, is a tall, strapping black man with an ivory-colored mustache and a head that must be bald because he always wears a hat. There have been times, while waiting my turn at the checkout counter, that I have amused myself by squinting him into an African bishop, a jazz musical, a high-rolling confidence man, a stockbroker. Curly is a man of many parts and possibilities who loves women with a salaciousness too all-encompassing to be anything but chaste. 

    When John shuffled into the store, Curly was packing groceries at the cash register. 

    "Hey there, John," he said softly. 

    John let out a low moan, looked down at his sneakers, and tried to say something. Curly nodded, continued packing the groceries and answered, "I know John, I know. But you just can't keep thinking about it." 

    But it is not possible for John to think about anything else. He shook his head slowly from side to side and began again. Maybe Curly didn't understand what had happened. Half sobbing, he tried again, but it was hard work. His tongue wouldn't do the right things. Finally, Curly withdrew his is hand from the grocery sack, clamped it firmly on John's shoulder, and interrupted. 

    "I know what you're saying, John. I know what you're saying. And it's hard to live with. But there ain't nobody who's going to get out of it. Not you. Not me. Not any body. We're all born to die, John. We're all born to die. Y'understand? " 

    John was silent. His head hung down over his chest. Then he nodded sadly, turned toward the door and started to leave. 

    'We'll see you, John" said Curly. "Just don't think about it." And with one last pastoral pat, Curly took his hand from John's shoulder and plunged it back into the sack to straighten out the groceries. Then John was gone. 

    This little neighborhood is not particularly noted for its advanced state of holiness. We rarely wake with sainthood on our minds. But it is a small enough place that pain and compassion have frequent opportunities to meet each other, and when that happens we are less a neighborhood than a diocese. 

    There is an insight to be gleaned for all of this, but my mind resists doing the necessary work to capture it. It is enough for me to witness these encounters when they take place, to understand that there is a certain power in them that sideswipes the Darwinists, while not necessarily invalidating them. Dogs do lie down with bunny rabbits…sometimes. But you have to hang around long enough to see it. Annie Dillard taught me that.