Gaye LeBaron: Coronavirus’s ‘month of Sundays’ has us rediscovering our neighborhoods

Many of us grew up hearing from our elders about those “good old days” when people sat on their front porches in the evenings and visited with neighbors, calling across the lawn or having “little talks” across the driveway.

Well, those good old neighborly days of long-distance visits are back. And, if you are looking for positives in the current shelter-in-place situation, appreciating your neighborhood is one of them.

Some of us have seen more of our neighbors in recent weeks than in all the years we have lived in the same house, on the same block.

With the gyms and the pools and the parks closed, residential streets have become our hope for maintaining fitness, for breathing fresh air (even if it’s through a mask), for checking out the glories of springtime - the last of the tulips, the first full bloom of the dogwood, the pansies showing promise and the tiny front-yard tomato plants promising that summer will come.

And sure enough, just like those “old days,” the streets are central to our lives.

There are strangers in our tiny neighborhood now, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, older women all alone. We didn’t used to wave or call out greetings to strangers in the “old days” did we? But we do now. We always, at least, wave.

These “old days” we are talking about? That would be about four weeks ago. Mid-March.

This all sounds kind of sweet, doesn’t it? It calls up a vision of a time you have to be old - really old - to remember, when people leaned out second-story windows to visit with friends and neighbors, mind the children playing in the street and discuss the news of the day.

We didn’t intend to go all Pollyanna on you. We all fully understand the seriousness-the apprehension, the tragedy even - of our situation. But this new wave of neighborliness, this subtle acknowledgment that we are all in it together and that we need each other - even with only a wave or a nod or a shout-out across the street - is welcome.

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SO, THAT’S a positive. We seek positives these days. We see things we like out there on the street.

We also see things we don’t like, let’s face it. Some are beyond comprehension. Why do some people, walking with cellphones, talk in such decibels they can be clearly heard a block away - or across four lanes of moderate traffic?

Did the woman telling a friend why she needed a hysterectomy realize that there were three or four strangers in her range? And there was no need to know that very angry man coming up behind you has a propensity for such vulgar language, or why that woman, way down the street, is thinking of - well, never mind what she’s thinking of.

And there is that occasional clue that not everyone is taking things as seriously as they should - like the young man in the passenger seat of a car speeding down a main thoroughfare, leaning out the window and making exaggerated coughing noises at people he passed. Kind of like a punch in the stomach to see and ?hear that.

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BLESSEDLY, THOSE are the exceptions. We streetwalkers (tee hee) are enjoying most of what we see and hear out there.

You can make your own list. Here’s mine.

Before and after the lovely rain the sky was and is as clear as we’ve seen it in years. We don’t miss the traffic noise, either.

Our yards have never looked better this early in the season, thanks to the bloom from a (too) mild winter and plenty of time to putter in the garden.

A family taking a walk on Sunday, along my neighborhood streets, the little girl with her own tiny umbrella, stopping at almost every yard, her father bending low to offer an early lesson in botany.

The trio of brothers on my block, ages (I’m guessing) maybe 7 to 13, who have turned our short street into a part-time soccer field, skateboard park, and bicycle race course. They are careful and safe and polite and exude enough energy to keep us all going forward - because that sort of energy is contagious. The best kind of contagious.

The Dog Parade. So many shapes and sizes. Their parks are closed, too. So they are forced to be led on leash and to pass each other beyond sniffing distance. A cruel fate. But I swear that most of them are smiling.

I saw two last week, taking their man for a walk. One was a collie, carrying him/herself like royalty in a procession, as collies do. The other was a curly little pooch with an odd gait, bouncing along behind, tail wagging, taking six steps to Lassie’s one. It took me a minute to realize the little pooch had only three legs. A rear one was lacking. But there was no lack of spirit.

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IF THE TWICE-DAILY WALK is the highlight of our days, it leaves plenty of time for contemplation; plenty of time to think, to wonder, what we (the collective “we”) will be like when this terrible time has passed.

Will people have changed? Will it be for the better? Will that young idiot, mock-coughing out of his car window while people were dying for lack of breath - will he have learned anything? Certainly, we will feel grateful to whatever higher power, scientifically explainable OR not, that granted us the privilege of living through these times.

Past disasters, pandemics, mass killings - the Black Plague, the “Spanish” flu, brutal wars both ancient and modern, the Holocaust - have shaped today’s world.

They didn’t change it quite enough, you say? I guess that’s one of the things we might think about now that we have the time - because, well, every day is Sunday.

Think about that. Those of us who are not health care workers or first responders (those precious few - too few, they will tell you - who keep the rest of us as safe -) or the grocery clerks and to-go servers who keep us fed and caffeinated are learning the meaning of solitude. We waken each morning with no place to be, no work that must be done, another “day of rest.” That’s a definition of “Sunday.”

As it stretches out before us, I would opt for the old saying, “a month of Sundays.” That’s like forever, a phrase people use to express the passage of time. “I haven’t been there in month of Sundays,” “It’s been a month of Sundays since we last talked.”

Curiosity (and time on my hands) sent me to the idiom experts to learn more about that phrase. It means more than just a very, very long time.

It’s been around since the 1700s, origin obscure, and is considered by wordsmiths to refer to the length of a month - 30 or 31 Sundays. It often turns up in sermons and is the title of at least seven books, ranging from self-help and gospel studies to a 1950s John Updike novel.

We’ve already seen Month 1 of those faux Sundays with more to come. There are a lot of people we will not see again for many months of Sundays.

We will talk to them on the phone, trade recipes. Even leave cookies on their doorsteps, or find hot cross buns on our front stoop. But we won’t sit down for a visit, or go to the movies, or meet for lunch, or play gin rummy or … you get my drift. And we certainly won’t shake hands. Or hug.

Will we ever hug again? How much will this change the greater world, which seems to be turning at a whirlwind pace while our personal everyday worlds have slowed to a crawl. Or no more than the speed of that walk around the neighborhood.