Tag: neighbors

Hold that Ladder

“You better hold that ladder.”


I say it out loud, as if I’m out there with them not standing over my kitchen sink, watching them as I scarf down my lunch.  The workmen climb up and down from the ground to the second-floor balcony, and it’s gripping.  I’m more invested in this scene than in any of the shows I’m binging online.


But that’s normal for me.  Spying on the neighbors across the street was always a favorite family pastime.  We’d all participate, making the occasional comment: “Huh, Mark must have the day off” and “That kid needs to be smacked.”  Like we were taking turns narrating a docuseries.


It was our favorite series.  The thing that brought us all together, the story that we all shared and cared about equally.  Most families get this from a show they watch together, gathered around the tv.  My family gathered around the living room window.


We’d even let it interrupt our dinners some nights.  Jim would notice something from the kitchen table and hop up, watch for a beat, then give us an update.  If it was really good, Dad would get up and join him.  The rest of us listened to their commentary, happily munching on our chicken.


Not like the chicken I’m eating now, which tastes like balsa wood flavored with poultry seasoning.


Now, I’m watching my neighbors alone.  I’m familiarizing myself with characters that my family doesn’t even know about, all the while wondering “What’s going on back on Washington Ave?”


Now, I’m missing the commentary from my brothers.  I’m missing the unity, the connectedness.  I’m missing what it feels like to share a moment with my family.


In reality, these things are missing because I flew the coop three years ago.
But right now, I blame the quarantine.

–Thomas Bragg

Mask No Mask

I live in what’s called, by real estate agents, an aspiring neighborhood. It’s a racially, linguistically, economically mixed neighborhood. In the Guatemalan or Salvadorian or Peruvian bakeries, restaurants, and stores on my neighborhood’s main street, most folks smile indulgently when I sputter out the few words of Spanish I know to try to convey that as a white woman I recognize I am the interloper here. I like it when they laugh in my face at my efforts. Usually it’s good-natured, but even if it isn’t, theirs is exactly the right attitude. I hope they’re thinking, and saying among themselves, “Learn the damn language if you’re going to live here.”

I drove down my main drag recently, which is less than a mile from the public college where I teach, and the college itself is now a covid testing site. Every person, big and small, tiny and tall, every person, to a person, was wearing a face mask. Of course, over 40% of the covid positive tests in RI are from the Latinx community. Another significant percentage is from the African-American community.

I had to be on the upper-crust East side this week too, around Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, where stately homes, fashionable restaurants, and the beautiful “Boulevard” reside for the joy of predominantly white folks. I found myself raging that, to my eye, 95% of people on the very-peopled East-side streets couldn’t be bothered to wear face masks.

“What, do they think, their spit don’t stink?” I raged. “What, are these too-cool-for-public-school richie-riches waiting for their goddamned, diamond-studded masks to be delivered to their doors by one of the front-liners working for Prime?”

“Put on an effing face mask!!” I shouted through my car window.

Neighborhoods matter. Neighbors matter.

–KLB