Old homes. Old friends.

If you’ve ever tried restoring an old home in your spare time, you know about some things. For example, you know about being halfway through a business meeting and realizing that your suit coat has as streak of plaster dust on it. You know how hard it is to do drafting with a thumb that had been assaulted by a hammer the night before. You know the anxiety of wondering if yesterday’s patch job will hold for the day, or will you find it on the floor that evening.

We learned all those things, Brenda and I, at 2107 South Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas back in the 1970s. What a time.

Perhaps the most comforting thing was to know that your new friends, your neighbors, were going, or had gone through, the same thing. Ah … the neighbors. There weren’t enough “different drummers” for them all to hear. They danced to tunes normal mortals couldn’t fathom. They saw things in their heads that would “make the horses bolt.” They shared two things, though. They all cared very much about old houses and very little about what the world thought of them. They were the types that would never belong to a country club or a “young ladies league.” They were the types that shunned society’s mandates like cats shun baths. If their neighbors were different, they dropped anchor instead of sailing to paler ports. They were the ones who got stared at during family reunions.

We fit right in.

Our home backed onto an alley, a leftover from when cities were designed properly. It was our connecting nerve, the spine that made us neighbors. I won’t describe our new friends individually, as some have evolved by now into what could be classified as specters of respectability. Some, unfortunately, succumbed to the short life span we enjoyed with one another—face-to-face—ere the “cell-phone” era separated folks prematurely. Some moved away and a few became somewhat prominent. The last thing resembling a reunion occurred years ago when our resident “neo-hippie” died and several of us gathered once more at a small apartment in “The Quarter” to rejoice in having known him. His ashes rested in his daughter's car, awaiting transport north while we drank wine and laughed a lot, the way best to remember a departed friend.

We recounted memories. Some talked of his artistry. Someone mentioned his hundreds of phonograph records and his joy at filling the neighborhood with their “wonderfulness” on Saturday mornings. Some recalled the young women from the Arkansas Art Center who would cycle (dual meaning here) through his life in a steady procession. Some recalled his gentle ways and generous manners. Some remembered his simple and complex soul.

I recalled the time I was sitting on the front porch of his house with him. His hair and beard made him look like a happy gnome who had just walked up Masonic and turned west onto Haight, headed for Ashbury instead of enjoying the view of Spring Street in Little Rock. Up the street lived a professional musician who looked more like Charles Manson than did Charles Manson. Across the street was the neighborhood’s elderly grandma who enjoyed sweeping her sidewalks of a morning in her housecoat, never bothering with the inconvenience of buttoning the front. Down the street lived the block’s junk collector and hoarder who kept the alley cleaned of any semi-useful object that had been discarded. There was a halfway house for the "functionally different" near, the neatest and quietest property in the area.

Then there was me, no doubt a psycho from the late war, living with a woman who treated Elm trees for disease with needles, rubber tubes, a strange liquid from Sweden, and a bicycle tire pump.

At that moment, as we enjoyed coffee that my friend ordered back then from some small company in Seattle, a young police officer walked up.

“Have you,” he asked, “seen any strange characters walking the neighborhood?”

“Those were the days, my friends.

We thought they’d never end.”

- Gene Raskin

Good neighbor.
Good friend.