This weekend I visit the old, quiet town of Northfield, MN, the college town with which I fell in love just five years ago. My years in this small town were my very first extended glimpse into a different culture--the gentle oh-jeez youbetcha rhythm of the Midwest. To my cold, dark Bostonian reticence and standoffishness, it was a warm and cheerful dawn.
This morning, I was walking down a calm and dew-soaked suburb's road in Northfield. The sky above was a thick gray ceiling of impenetrable cloud, and all around me, summer-green trees drooped heavy with the rain they caught in last night's storm. My eyes, which for several months had adjusted to the claustrophobic streets of Boston, glided over these Minnesotan streets like wide-winged birds in a limitless arboreal paradise. As I moseyed down my private tree-lined highway, the tremulous calls of birds mixed seamlessly with the low, rumbling growl of some man's lawnmower not too far down the street.
The rumble of the mower rose with every step I took. In the wash of its hum, I passed great, spacious houses, which stood placid and solemn like monolithic guardians on the banks of a paved river. The humming of the mower grew more present, and I looked across the expanse of pavement to the operator, a gray-haired man in shorts and dad socks whose belly bulged behind a gray college tee-shirt. I smiled as I approached the man, as if I held some beautiful secret, and as we drew closer, I turned my head to the lawn-mowing man. He turned to me. I lifted up a hand. He lifted his in reciprocity. There was no word, no smile, but in a moment like a bubble on the surface of a pond, I became, to this unknown lawn-mowing man, a neighbor who deserved a wave.
On I walked, but my thoughts lingered in reflection on that moment of exchange. I felt that I'd received a gift, but what was given me? It was surely nothing tangible, but psychological: a message, a signal. I gave mine, my wave, and said my seeing. He heard my seeing, and said he saw me back. In an instant, we established our equality: as seers, messengers, interpreters. And, like a single drop of blood in a glass of water, the wave instilled a human tint to my morning; it flushed my blood of Boston's cruel impassibility. I was renewed, made human, clean.
Be aware: I don't exalt this Midwest town beyond its due; it's not a fairy tale; it has its grit and grime spread thick as any other human colony. But for a man who since September marched a social death on Boston streets, it is good to know that, here, in this small, humble, peaceful town, the "neighbor" lives.
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