I live in a low income housing neighborhood. I know it is low income housing because I know what I pay for my housing, and I have talked to my neighbors. I didn’t ask what they pay, but they dropped hints. I live in a neighborhood where walking at night might not be safe, and where racial tension is tense. I live in a neighborhood where a lady pushes a buggy by my door as I leave the house to go to work. I wave to her some mornings. Some mornings she looks up at me. I’m not sure she has waved back yet. Shoes hang from the power lines in my neighborhood. The walls of the houses are thin in my neighborhood. A critter lives in the roof of my house. We will need to call the land lord. The lady down the street is moving out because her land lord won’t take care of the rat problem. Cars are loud in my neighborhood. My neighborhood is on the other side of the tracks.
If a person were to drive a mile down from where I live they would find neat rows of houses that are so empty they look empty. They exude vacancy along with their perfection. The houses have perfect lawns, are perfectly painted, and have no perfect people to go in them. They are what my father would have called crackerjack houses. I never understood this phrase as a child, but I think it just means they aren’t worth shit. He also called them matchstick houses, which most likely means they aren’t worth shit. These houses are built using the same floor design, and general blueprints. They go up shoddy as fast as can be managed by a small crew of underpaid carpenters. Sometimes I drive by to look at the empty houses and freak myself out. There is something really scary about a cookie-cutter place like that.
Yesterday I watched a nerdy guy show that he had big manly man-sized balls. I know him ok. He is a nerd. If you were to talk to him for fifteen minutes he would tell you about his achievements. He was first chair in an orchestra, and he managed a restaurant. He would squint at you, and talk intelegently about a sermon or a thing in the news. He did such and such on his SAT. He is a smart guy, and a likeable guy. He is no Marlin Brando. This guy is a dork, and as a dork, he managed to do something more badass than anything I’d seen in a long time.
He bought burgers. He bought a grill. He bought beer. He bought bottled waters. He invited all his friends to a cookout. When I say friends, I mean people in the low income neighborhood, some of whom might be white, who he had introduced himself to by knocking on their doors. His white friends showed up to the cookout in their cars since the white friends all lived in other low income neighborhoods. Then noticing that not all his friends had come to the cookout, he made a round of the neighborhood, knocking on doors and pointing to the grill. If I felt like telling you what neighborhood he did this in, I could tell you about the increased crimerate in that area of town. I could tell you how dangerous what he was doing really was. I could make you see how beautiful it really was. Trust me. It was beautiful. It was just beautiful.
When he was done going door to door, he came back and kept cooking hotdogs without a word about what he had done. I imagine that to him there wasn’t anything to talk about, because to him what he was doing was as normal as water going downhill. I imagine he is right. He resettled his glasses, and squinted the way he does. He started talking to a family he had invited over for the event. They live just down the street. The family, by the way, was a man and his wife and their three adopted little black boys. That family thought they were normal, and they were normal. I’m wrong to have noticed there was ever anything worth a comment, but I did. Noticeing is what I do. I noticed that what my friend had done was just normal to him; just like the family he was talking to was normal. What he had done was normal, unless you were anyone affected by the prejudice, avarice, and racism that come with growing up in the South. Those things are present all over, but I know them in the South. Apparently this one nerdy dude had escaped all that. He was just inviting his neighbors to a cookout. He actually was just inviting his neighbors out to a cookout.
I’m not the only one who noticed something else though. I overheard one of the gentlemen who came out this afternoon talking to my friend. He said, “You know, when you first came knocking on my door I said to myself ‘You must be shit’n me.’ But you weren’t shit’n me. You are real.” This was not the first time the nerdy dude had knocked on his door.
I was encouraged, and challenged as I watched him walk around the corner with a stranger to look at a garden or whatever it was. I never asked what they had gone to look at. I realized that I’d been trying to be bold, but I was doing it wrong. It is easy to think that being bold means standing up to someone who is bugging you. Sure, it can mean that. Today I was fortunate enough to see boldness used to be kind. It was good to see boldness look normal.
Yesterday I was invited to a cookout in my neighborhood and I met my neighbors. I sat and watched a little boy play a video game where he went around killing zombies, and talked with his parents about the weather/economy, and I ate hodogs, and I got mad as anyone else did when we couldn't keep the flies away from the food, and I had a few good laughs, and I heard a baby cry, and I drank a few beers, and I shook a few hands and I realized that a lot of what happened today was not about racism. It wasn’t socio-economic either. I was about a guy who wanted to have a cookout with his neighbors. I live in a neighborhood now. I know the name of the man who lives across the street. We talked about motorcycles. I know the guy that lives to the right. He told me about Jesus. I did know the lady that lives to the left of my house, but she moved out because of the rats. I think if there is any hope for the world, it is going to happen at a cook out, because there is some strange magic in hotdogs that makes people like each other better. Yeah, it was the hotdogs..... or maybe it was the beer.
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