Neighborhoods were once places where lifelong bonds were born. Is that still true today?
I got an email earlier this week from someone I have known pretty much all my life – the mother of five friends I grew up with in my old neighborhood back in the seventies and eighties. She had a question for me regarding a column I had recently written.
I replied, and when she wrote back, she said, “We still feel like neighbors.”
It was a nice sentiment, especially since she and her husband and their three daughters and two sons and I have been spread throughout the Sanford area and beyond for decades now.
That goes for just about everyone from our ol’ neighborhood in downtown Sanford – my mother is literally the final resident of all those who lived in my childhood stomping grounds 30-plus years ago. Everyone else either has moved to somewhere new or, sadly, has passed away.
“We’ll always be neighbors, no matter where life takes us,” I wrote back to my friends’ mother.
And that’s the truth. One of the joys of getting older is the way certain groups outside my immediate family have come to feel like family themselves in recent years. My fellow graduates of the Class of 1990 have sure started to feel like siblings in recent years, as a core group of us who actually never hung out together back in the day now do so a few times a year.
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This feeling of extended family absolutely extends to the ones who were there in the very beginning – the friends with whom I spent so much time while growing up in the neighborhood of Shaw, Prescott and Kimball streets in downtown Sanford.
Oh, there were so many of us – at any one time throughout the seventies to mid-eighties, you could count anywhere between 20 and 25 of us kids in the neighborhood. There were us “constant kids,” who were born into the neighborhood, or moved there at an early age, and stayed there right up through the summer after high school or beyond. And then we had variety, kids who would move into one of the few apartment houses or duplexes on our blocks, stay for a while, sometimes for years, and then move somewhere else – only to be replaced by new families with their own children to add to our mix.
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Our parents owned our homes, but we owned the streets and the backyards and the parking lots and the nearby woods and the field behind the greenhouse of the local florist and the tall snowbanks. These were the venues where we faced off during scratch games of baseball, kickball and other sports, where we played hide and seek during the daytime and flashlight tag at night, where we slid down white powdered hills and built forts and threw snowballs during the wintertime, and where we pretended to be cops and robbers and “Star Wars” characters and other heroes and villains of our day.
And that was just the landscape. As for landmarks, we had plenty.
We had two ballparks – one of which had playground offerings that included one of those tall, narrow, metal slides that nobody would let any children near in this day and age.
We had an outdoor strip mall up the street, anchored by a department store that sold everything we needed – toys, music, video games, clothes, magazines, you name it – and filled out by an ice cream parlor, a gift shop, and more.
We had a movie theater – ah, yes, the movie theater, where 40 years ago this summer, we all went together to catch the late show of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” one night in August.
We had everything in reach, there in our downtown neighborhood – the elementary schools we attended, the churches we went to, the library where we borrowed books, the gathering places for scout meetings. All were within walking distance. All were places my friends and I could go together, or visit alone, at a young age.
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Most of these places still exist, actually. To be sure, the church I attended, St. Ignatius, is now an affordable housing complex for seniors. And the movie theater is long gone, replaced by a new police station.
But these are the places where memories were made. Let me get back to the people. The kids I grew up with. The ones with whom I remain friends to this day. The ones whose parents I now consider friends as well, now that I’m all grown up like them.
These days, my old neighborhood is quieter. I almost never see kids playing in the streets and yards whenever I visit Mom. A few of the neighbors seem to know each other, but it does not resemble my day, when everybody knew just about everybody.
Do tight-knit neighborhoods, such as the one I grew up in, exist anymore? They must. They’ve got to be out there, somewhere.
But as I drive around, as I go about my days, I never manage to see them in action. I’ve never had to slow down on a residential street, so that kids playing a game of kickball can retreat to the sidewalks for a moment and let me pass safely through. I go for walks on summer nights and never see the beams of flashlights cutting through the dark as kids hide behind trees and in tall grass. If ever I see kids, it’s just a few of them, here and there, never in bunches.
Perhaps it’s official: I’m an old guy, lamenting what has been lost and insisting my generation had it better than the one now does. Of course, the older generations no doubt looked at me and my friends while we were growing up and thought the same way.
But hey. My generation and our elders still have something in common: We can all look around and see all of the things that have been lost. I hope neighborhoods packed with children, playing outdoors and forming extended families they will cherish their whole lives, is not among them.
Shawn P. Sullivan is an award-winning columnist and is a reporter for the York County Coast Star. He can be reached at ssullivan@seacoastonline.com.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Neighborhoods once were places where bonds were born. Is it still so?
