Daniel, Who Is My Neighbor, Part 1
Daniel, who is my neighbor, sits with me on the first Saturday morning in May. My show-off-y garden is the backdrop for our conversation; there a dozen pink and purple poppies nod above a bevy of their golden cousins. Yellow nasturtiums run a carpet under the avocado trees. “I’m here to listen to the story of how you moved into the house that makes you my neighbor,” I say.“That’s pretty easy,” says Daniel. “Jenny and I were married in 2004. We’d been friends since we were kids in middle school where we met. I grew up in Riverside, and Jenny in Moreno Valley.
The first few years
“The first few years of our marriage were a lot of back and forth. We jumped from apartment to house. For a little while we moved in with my parents so I could finish my teaching credential. We lived downtown for a while. Then, a year or two before Naomi came along, we started looking at houses. We were gonna adopt a baby, do a home study, and all this kind of stuff. “Both of our parents lived in Moreno Valley. So we went to Moreno Valley and we were there for a few years. It was a nice place. It was fine. I don’t know. It just wasn’t really what we wanted in the long run. Plus, I worked in Jurupa Valley. I wanted to be closer to work. I hated fighting the traffic. So we started thinking. “Jenny is incredibly good at researching things. And she’ll look into something and find all the different ways of going about it. Make a million calls, get on internet forums, and figure stuff out. She figured out all the best ways of finding a place to rent. We tested all of these different methods. We spent a lot of time, maybe a year and a half, looking for places in Riverside.
We're gonna need three bedrooms
“Around the same time we started preparing to adopt a second time. We thought, ‘Okay, definitely we’re gonna need three bedrooms. And we wanted it to be a dual-immersion school neighborhood. At the time there were just three of them in Riverside.”Like many of us, Jenny and Daniel reached out to someone they knew for ideas. She was one of Daniel’s colleagues who had also been Jenny’s principal when she was teaching. Their question, “What’s the best dual-immersion school in Riverside?” She told them Washington Elementary. Daniel says, “Jenny became super focused on finding a home for rent in the Washington Elementary neighborhood. She spent months and months and months researching. We would call and look at places. We’d decide it wasn’t a fit for us, the landlord, or whatever.”On a whim they walked through a house that came up for sale on Miguel Street. “We weren’t intending to buy,” Daniel says, “But we saw it. Then, a year and a half or two later we end up over here looking for a place to rent. We pulled up, and said, ‘We’ve looked at this house before.’”
We've got a cute little kid
Daniel smiles remembering. “We walked into the garage and met this nice couple, Sandy and Tom, the owners. We’ve got a cute little kid,” he laughs. “She was a year and a couple of months old at the time. And right away they were like, ‘You guys wanna rent here? That’s fine. You said you're a principal and you’ve got this cute kid. Cool. You guys can move in.’“We were really excited to think of our kids someday going to Washington, and being bi-lingual like Jenny is, and we were really excited to live near Victoria [Avenue], kind of a central neighborhood here in Riverside. A lot of my friends lived here when I was a teenager. We have wonderful neighbors. It’s mellow. “The one thing that drives me totally crazy is the Stater Brothers parking lot and the noise over there.” Listening and imagining, I wince in sympathy, “I am sure it does,” I say. Daniel admits, “Sometimes I think we made a mistake. It’s so crazy. Noise drives me nuts. That’s the problem. It just totally drives me nuts.” As neighborhoods go, this is a quiet street, but living directly behind a supermarket has its drawbacks. Susan mentioned this too when we talked.
Everything jelled
“Shortly after that, my parents ended up moving ‘cause they wanted to be near us. We had been so close and then suddenly like twenty-five minutes away.” I add, “With those beautiful granddaughters.”Daniel continues. “They ended up nearby. My brother and his wife lived in LA. They would never move back to the Inland Empire. And they ended up in Mission Grove, so they’re not too far away. Jenny’s mom moved back to Riverside. So it’s like, Oh! This is cool. Everything jelled. And my drive is so much shorter every day.“Our nice relationship with our landlords has continued. We moved in with a five-year plan, and now we’ve been here going on seven years.”I’m surprised. “Oh, wow! Is it really? That went fast! I remember when you guys moved in with little Naomi. Boy! Is it already seven years?”
I can't. I just. I can't.
Smiling, Daniel assures me, “It will be this summer. It’s incredible. It was actually my first day back at work and we were moving. It was my second year as principal and I told Jenny, ‘I can’t. I just. I can’t.’ And yet it was the only day that worked. “We had a terrible rental company we were dealing with back then. They were nightmarish. It was the day we had to go. It was like mid-week. With our landlords Sandy and Tom, we made it all work.”“Oh,” I sigh, remembering the small-t trauma that is moving, “that’s hard.”
Jenny is strong
Daniel says. “Jenny is strong. She’s tough. She proved how strong she was that day.” I nod. I appreciate Daniel recognizing his wife’s fortitude. “We had some stuff that I’d have otherwise called one of my brothers, or somebody to come help me lift. And Jenny was like right there.”I interrupt him. “You mean physically strong! You’re not just talking emotionally strong.”With a laugh he says, “She’s emotionally strong. She’s tough, but yeah, she did her share of lifting that day, which is cool. I’ll never forget that.”Interrupting again, I say, “With the baby. There’s a baby while all of this is going on.”Daniel detects my awe. “Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Jenny’s pretty tough. Jenny does a lot of those kinda things. To me it’s like one of the...” He stops and starts again. “She’s so great at developing these projects that occupy her time and her thinking. It ends up being like a thing, her project at the time. Moving was one of those.“She wouldn't have been satisfied had she not fully invested herself and come to thoroughly understand how all of that works. And it ended up great. I’m happy. I’m happy we didn’t end up in the place over on Jane [Street] that we looked at three weeks before.”
Road not taken & fresh bread
Ah, the road not taken, I think to myself. Aloud I say, “All of these seemingly small windows — Oh, we could have gone this way, or this way. You’d have had a completely different story. It would still be a good story.” Daniel agrees, “Yeah, it’s true. It would have been okay.” But I sense his reluctance. He’s really happy here and thankful for the road not taken.“I should add too,” says Daniel, “the day we moved in, our neighbor Ken came over.” (Ken, for new readers, is my best person and husband.) “Ken said, ‘My wife baked this bread. I hope you guys eat this.’’’ Laughter overtakes Daniel. I just smile. In another town, on another welcome-to-the-neighborhood visit, Ken returned home, fresh bread in hand. The would-be recipient declined the gift politely then confided that “Gluten gives me the runs.” Ken has suppressed the shock of that encounter, but I remember his dazed look. And the words that made Daniel laugh signal that Ken exercises caution when proffering a grainy loaf. Daniel continues, “I remember I said some joke like, ‘Oh, we’re paleo’ or something. Which we’re not.” I laugh because paleo has nothing on the above option. “But,” Daniel adds, “I think Ken was like, ‘Uh. Yeah.’”I admit to Daniel, “We’re both very serious and sincere until we get the hang of what’s going on. And then,” my voice runs up and down a short scale, “Ooooooh. We can roll with a joke.”Daniel nods, “I’m pretty dry, yeah. When you’re really dry, not everybody gets that all the time.” I agree, “Especially not right at the beginning.”
Really sweet
“But, yeah, that was really sweet,” Daniel says. “And it was in a Trader Joe’s flour bag.”“Oh,” I say, catching up with the return to fresh baked bread. “Yes.” And I remember the empty paper bag that first held flour and then wrapped a loaf made of that flour.“It was very cool,” Daniel says with a warm smile. “I’m glad,” I reply, slightly flustered by this direct praise. “I do easy,” I say quickly. “So I’m glad it’s cool. And," I add, shifting the focus from myself, "you moved in on a day that I was baking. That was not planned.”Does Daniel sense my mild praise-anxiety? Perhaps he does, because he says with a straight face, “Oh. We just assumed it was coming every Saturday.” Our laughter leaps out over the table and my momentary awkwardness subsides. I say, “Well, I’m so glad we did that. Good on us!”Daniel replies, “It reflected very well on you. It was cool.”And just like that the tables are turned. I show up and ask Daniel to tell me a story; my part—to hear him, see him. In a blink, I am perceived, I am seen.I stammer, “Well, oh. Good.”
As I write this entry for Who Is My Neighbor, I find another answer to the project question. We are social beings and we validate (or invalidate) one another in our simplest exchanges. Like pink poppies and yellow nasturtiums we thrive in good soil, tilt toward the light, and send our roots deep for the water of life. We flourish when seeing and being seen, giving and receiving in the dignity of mutual respect. Or we wither from the drought of non-reception or the flood of ever-giving, and die a slow death in the darkness of disrespect and the weeds of contempt.Through this socially engaged art my neighbors and I embody the ordinary practice of showing up as ourselves—and discovering that this is enough, cool, good. This miracle leaves us stammering and grateful to be who we are, where we are. We are here, and as Wendell Berry tells us in his poem "The Wild Geese", “...what we need is here.” It is and we are.
