Welcome to the Neighborhood

Long-time Pasadena resident Mary Lea Carroll is no stranger to authorship. Indeed, the two of them are on quite good terms.

Carroll’s Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints appeared in 2019, followed in 2020 by Somehow Saints: More Travels in Search of the Saintly. In these books Carroll writes of her global travels to the local habitations of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, and so on, fleshing out stories the centuries have tied to various saints’ names.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Carroll found her travels curtailed. One day, homebound, with her daily schedule a list of cancellations, she thought to herself, “Hmm, what’s up for the week? Referring to my agenda, I laughed-wow, how will I squeeze in all this nothing?”

Or so Carroll writes in her wonderful new book of creative nonfiction, Across the Street, Around the Corner … A Road Home.

Recall the early months of the pandemic. Social distancing, masks, lockdowns, vaccinations, online meetings: most Pasadena residents did their part to “flatten the curve,” to minimize the rates of infections, illnesses, and deaths. They did their civic duty in a public health emergency. These were difficult times, often quite isolating, and like the pandemic, they are not completely over.

The pandemic brought Carroll a different kind of travel: “Can’t travel the world? Well, let’s travel the neighborhood.” And so she did, by daily walks. On these walks, Carroll often encountered and chatted with her neighbors, at a social distance.

Across the Street gathers stories about these neighbors, those Carroll has now and those she had growing up with her eight siblings in her parents’ house adjacent Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane. Wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, acquaintances, strangers: in the stories Carroll tells or recounts her Pasadena and Altadena friends telling, all these relations interweave with neighbor relations.

The book’s feral cats, coyotes, guppies, ponies, dogs, goats, monkeys, and birds are also in the neighborhood mix.

Neighbors include more than people. Readers will find Carroll hugging and thanking a century-old tree slated for removal because dangerously weakened by drought: arboreal neighborliness.

The book’s chapter titles include “Finding Home,” “So, Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?,” and “Beyond Your Own Backyard.” The title of the first chapter is “Hello, Neighbor,” a greeting made famous by TV’s Mister Rogers.

The book’s chapters tell of small kindnesses making big differences among generous, considerate, sometimes difficult people. The neighbors and neighborhoods of Across the Street form no simple G-rated utopia. There are battles over zoning, overly loud music, people facing homelessness, a drive-by shooting, an alcoholic bully railing against the government, and a murderer.

Who said being a neighbor would be easy? Here and there in the book are paragraphs in which Carroll meditates on her own struggles to live up to neighborliness and heed the ethical demand each neighbor’s face poses: here I invoke the thought of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Across the Street invokes St. Therese of Lisieux, “known for doing the tiniest acts,” such as saying hello to a stranger, but performing these acts “with so much intention that they became elevated far above what the small acts actually were.” 

Amidst the book’s stories are hints on offering neighbors such modest acts of care: saying hello, cooking a meal, and babysitting a child are examples. None of these are unfamiliar or unusual, but Carroll’s situating them in the day-to-day effort to weave solidarity amidst a global health emergency brings out their vital importance.

Who said being a neighbor would be easy?

Carroll gets to these gestures so smoothly in telling her stories the reader easily receives her moral instruction. Or is “moral instruction” even a remotely apt phrase here? In the book’s depictions of the pursuit of neighborliness, any distinction between moral existence and the joyful, pleasurable daily life among neighbors fades toward disappearance.

The author admits that wine and whisky can help. Yet the fabric of society will not weave itself. With calm force, Carroll shows how, amidst a pandemic, in a crisis, you do not have to be a saint, just a kind neighbor.

Well, you don’t have to be kind to neighbors at all, as tendencies in American political life now demonstrate. Kindness to neighbors, Carroll emphasizes, is a choice, an intentional practice in support of a fragile web of relationships.

Yet having neighbors is a primal given of life, or so claim Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the religions scholars call Abrahamic, after the Abraham of Genesis. Those scholars sometimes brood over the etymological entanglement of the words “hospitality” and “hostility” (consider Jacques Derrida’s two-volume study, Hospitality). With neighbors, accursed violence and beatific peace are immanent, undecidable potentials.

You cannot be certain beforehand. Faith is needed. Courage. So Carroll must ask, “What if you have truly difficult neighbors? Is there a way to love those neighbors as you love and even protect your family, yourself?”

Across the Street reminds us that of the planet’s 8.2 billion people, any one of them might end up being your neighbor. You never know. A republic is a small, semiporous floating island of citizens adrift a vast ocean of neighbors. Carroll recounts how individuals from China, Ethiopia, Columbia, and Iran ended up in the US as her neighbors, much to their delight and hers.

Carroll’s tone is lighthearted, her stories quite charming, often funny, and gracefully told. Readers need not be religious, conventionally or otherwise, to appreciate Across the Street, Carroll’s faith being so finely dissolved into the habits of her daily life (admirable, that). You just need to enjoy heartfelt stories about daily life in the Pasadena of the pandemic and the Altadena of Carroll’s youth.

Of the 549,690 or so hours of my life so far, only about three of them have been spent in houses of worship, and this was only due to the distraught insistence of my maternal grandmother. Yet I find Across the Street very moving, beautiful, even, in its gentle insistence on the practice of the love of neighbors.

Microdosing saintliness never hurt anybody.

Across the Street, Around the Corner … A Road Home, by Mary Lea Carroll. Clyde Custom Publishing, 164 pages, $21.95.