Block party

We had neighbors over tonight, and I love it when everything is so ordinary and so precious in its ordinariness. I like how everyone just hummed along like little clocks on a shelf together. We're all friends and cohorts and all our kids are going to Grow Up Together. So it's a darned good thing we like each other, but we're incredibly lucky to have found the kind of community we have right here on the block. As far as I can tell, a lot of people live in bedroom communities that empty out in the mornings and fill back up in the evenings, and they don't know each other all that well. It's just the luck of the draw, too. Across the little gully behind our house and garden in Santa Cruz 20 years ago a guy would get drunk from time to time, yell and moan, and chop wood. I remember my exasperation, and wondering how it could be that I hadn't already done my time around people so deranged by drinking? I just had to let that idea go, or fume every time I heard the thwack! of his ax right across the little gully from us, where the surf and fog could swallow the rhythmic hacks from the hearing of most of his neighbors. Fortunately, I don't have neighbors like that anymore. Phew!