Northwood News ♦ December 2010

President’s Message

By Laura Hussey

My husband, David, and I were saddened to learn recently that one of our elderly neighbors has passed away during the summer without our noticing.  We had formed a tenuous bond with the gentleman, Elmer, over our common love of dogs.  Although a stroke had made it difficult for Elmer to carry on normal conversation, his interest in our dogs — and through them, in us — transcended those difficulties.  I was touched by how much we were able to share with few words.

Elmer’s passing (or, more pointedly, the fact that it took several months for us to realize that he had passed) reminded me how much I value the sense of community and neighborliness that we manage to share in this neighborhood, in spite of our hectic and overscheduled lives.  It also reminded me of my responsibility to contribute to it.

There is no recipe for community.  Each of us contributes in his or her own way.  The point is, if I may borrow a cliché, as a community, we are greater than the sum of our individual lives.  That sense of community exists only because of people who do the little things.

For us, the sense of community started soon after we moved in, when our next door neighbors brought over cookies AND Milkbones for the dogs!  I was so touched by their thoughtfulness and knew we had made the right decision to buy in this neighborhood.  A few years later, several dog-loving neighbors helped us track down one of our dogs which had escaped when I absent-mindedly sent dogs out when the gate was open.  Even after the dog was safely home, I got phone calls and people knocking on my door to make sure she was home safely.

And I can’t tell you how heart-warming it was when a police car showed up at our house early one Sunday morning because a neighbor had noticed a white van that appeared to be taking too much interest in our house.  (The van was our newspaper distributor, who had come out because we had complained that the newspaper had not been delivered, and he was looking for the lost paper.)

It is healthy to react when something seems “wrong” to you — to be concerned about petty crime, to be annoyed at politicians wasting our money while declaring that we can’t afford to keep port-potties in our parks.  These days, our neighborhood email list is filled with people venting about these concerns.  But it is also exceedingly healthy to take responsibility for doing what you can to improve the situation.  Our neighborhood creek cleanup is just one of the great examples of how we in this neighborhood work together to make a difference.

But making a difference doesn’t have to be “organized.”  For example, there have been calls for a neighborhood Crime Watch, but I am convinced that we can be just as effective individually as any organized crime watch would be.  A great example is my neighbor calling the police when something looked amiss.  Get to know your neighbors, when they are home, exchange phone numbers, know their kids.

Years from now none of us will have any memory of the day we got all our errands done or made the house spotlessly clean, but we will remember the personal connections we make and the sense of community we share.  I will miss Elmer and am saddened that I got so caught up in my own busy life that I missed an opportunity to enrich both our lives by letting him and his family know that I had appreciated getting to know him a little.

Join me in making a resolution for 2011 to contribute what I can to neighborliness and community.   ■