We're Not Gossiping, We're Networking

We are all searching for connections. Serena and I are lucky that we found each other swimming laps at our local community pool. While doing our endless laps, garbed as we are in Speedos, caps, goggles, earplugs (me), fins (Serena) and often Lycra long sleeved shirts to shield us from the harsh rays of the sun, it is difficult to chit chat. It's in the locker room where all the networking takes place. We have no Deconstructionist Tinklers at our club, but we do have a lot of moms. And moms the world over gather, whether around cooking fires, community wells, or busy playgrounds, to discuss their issues. Their issues with kids, husbands, employers, others.

Finding kindred spirits in classrooms, jobs, volunteer gigs, the kids' swim team, and locker rooms is something Serena and I have in common. To connect with others is to peel away the every day layers of our lives and find meaning in what we do. It might look like we are hedonistic exercise junkies. We have found however, that it is by exercising that we cope with the stresses of life. We live charmed suburban lives for the most part. But there are days when issues with a kid or two make us want to turn our mini-vans toward the coast and head like lemmings to the sea.

There are days when venting to another soul makes us feel way better about: the highschool robot voice calling to report a child's unexplained absences in first, third, and fifth periods, and the spousal disagreement over what in the light of day seems trivial. I love being able to connect and discover a really good book, the best shoe store salesguy who can deal with "weird" feet, and to learn the good, the bad, and the hideous about local summer camps. We keep our eyes open, even underwater (love those goggles). We listen. It's amazing what you can hear when you stop to pay attention. It's amazing what you can hear when people think you are not listening.

The unexamined life is not worth living. --Socrates in Plato, Dialogues, Apology. Greek philosopher in Athens. 469 BC -399 BC

Just Like Everyone Else

While Samantha was keeping her neighborhood safe for posterity, I was in graduate school at an unnamed university, getting a Ph.D. in a ridiculously useless field. At the time, I did not know this was a useless field; I was convinced that everyone cared deeply about post-colonial discursive practices, narrative desire in the novels of Balzac, and semantic instability in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Why wouldn't I think so, when all my other grad student friends who lived in under-furnished apartments with cats and ethnic art on the walls and terrorized naive undergrads in discussion sections were convinced that we were all doing something urgently meaningful?

It did not occur to me until later -- much, much later, after I had two children and couldn't get a teaching job to save my life -- that there was a whole world out there where people did not give a rat's patootie about Lacan's Mirror Stage or Heidegger's inscrutable rants or Adorno's Marxist tirades, that what we were all doing was nothing if not some big-time collective navel-gazing. But my funny friend Lawrence, the one with the mind and the sense of humor of a 15-year-old boy, the one who had stolen my desk copy of Boccaccio's Decameron and inscribed "To my good friend Samantha, From G. Boccaccio" in red ballpoint pen on the fly-leaf, he knew. He was not taken in at all, and when a major superstar in critical studies who happened to be a good friend of the professor paid a visit to his theory seminar, Lawrence knew what was really important. During break, he went to use the restroom and found himself hip to hip, as it were, with the great man himself. As soon as the seminar was over, Lawrence sprinted to the room where the teaching assistants congregated and breathlessly announced to his rapt audience that he had just been to the restroom with the great man, and -- well, we wouldn't believe this, but... the great man tinkles just like everyone else.

We should all be so grounded. Or at least be friends with grounded people who pay attention to what goes on in restrooms at major universities and are willing to share that information with others.

Why We're Doing This

Serena's sense of humor just kills me. Because we are more than a decade apart age-wise, I cannot remember much about Bewitched episodes. While she watched re-runs, I was probably watching Samantha doing her witchy business in Prime Time. Looking back it was Prime Wasted Time. But I did get one thing out of it: Gladys Kravitz. Although at first recollection I was sure her name was Edith.

I've lived in the same house for 27 years. During that time, the neighbors have come and gone. Some have indeed died. Most have moved away, replaced by other neighbors. Sometimes we have traded up, and sometimes we can't wait for the replacement neighbors to move away. Once, when talking about how our street should really be called Divorce Court, as it appeared very few marriages were lasting, my brother called me Gladys Kravitz. Who? Me? Just because I make it my business to know who lives where and with whom? Just because I was once a BLOCK CAPTAIN of the street? That was back when the police were too busy to catch some serial creep. People were scared, and motivated to come to a meeting where they agreed to do more than drive in and out of their garages each day. They agreed to be neighborly and look out for each other. That was then, and this is now. Creepos are eventually caught or they move on to other neighborhoods. Over time people forget to look out for each other. It takes a Gladys or two to make a neighborhood, to have their fingers on the various pulses that make a block, a street, a neighborhood, and indeed a community work. Want to know what's really going on in the parenting department of our charmed suburban community? Ask Gladys...or in this case, ask Serena and Samantha. They are right behind the lace curtains and...they know.