Baring ourselves in the summer
WE'VE PASSED the Memorial Day barrier and that means we're entering the season of transparency. Warm weather brings the bleeding of the private into the public. Summer uncovers us.
How we bare ourselves is best revealed at the beach. Where else can you examine the way a family or couple eats, dresses, scolds each other, or how their bodies have fared, or not fared, so well since winter?
In tightly packed or suburban neighborhoods, adjacent lives leak over fences and cross property lines. The fortifications of our residential allotments mean little. The season exposes our smells, habits, and desires.
When someone nearby fires up a grill, I can smell the unmistakable blend of lighter fluid and charcoal. Then meat. Hmmm. Chicken? Beef? Next, the dog two doors down begins to whelp. Stuck on the back porch again. She only wants to be heard. Who can blame her?
As for the dog's owners, being heard is not a problem. Four generations, all living under one roof, stream in and out of their triple-decker. Herds of automobiles arrive and depart. They use car horns as communication devices: "Ma, I'm home!"; "I'm leaving now!"; "I'm waiting - get in the car!" Thanks for sharing. The street becomes their second living room, extra air space for extending arguments. The baby cries, the teenage son shouts at his mother, someone loiters late with friends and litters the sidewalk with candy wrappers by morning.
Because my office faces the street, I've had to recalibrate my sense of what is a "normal" noise. I want to shout, "Shut up!", further shattering the public/private spheres. But I bite my tongue. After four years here, I am still adjusting.
Even our dreams are naked to the world.
From my 20-by-40-foot Somerville backyard, through the chain-link fence, I can see an abutting garden and its phalanxes of tomato plants, lush and perfect, already dwarfing my efforts. I try not to feel like a failure. A sham tomato man.
Out my second-floor kitchen window, I peer through the hemlock tree to the deck of the house behind me. High school kids arrive over the course of the night. Guitars are played. Beer is consumed. The parents must be away. No need to call the cops. "Go kids. You go," I think.
And on Monday nights, the refuse of my street's wild weekends is displayed for public consumption. Into the blue recycling bins go the physical evidence: toys children got bored with, cartons from new purchases, and mountains of empties that could repeat the laughter, the pick-up lines, even the secrets of the lips that touched them.
Each garbage night, a man arrives at dusk, plying his bicycle up and down the blocks of my neighborhood. He tows a cart filled with returnable bottles. I hear the "clink clink" of his hands rummaging for gold.
I, too, have sifted through what my neighbors once deemed not essential.
My armchair, stool, and bookshelf - even discarded newspapers and magazines - speak to the collective economy of lives overlapping. Out of frugality, or curiosity, what was theirs has become mine.
One hot August night last summer, I went out for a restless walk. At the house at the corner, a huge honeysuckle hedge obscures a rusted fence. But I already knew the bush was in bloom: during breezy downpours, its sweetness often reaches my open window two long blocks away. A fragrant message from the cosmos. Or call it an accidental gift.
Then I heard a rustle in the greenery. A cat? A dog? No - out waddled a raccoon, practically panting. It was safe behind a fence, but only 3 feet away. It froze. So did I.
For a full three minutes we stared at each other: Two night creatures, trying to bridge the gulf between domesticity and the wild. Between stranger and neighbor. We were entwined. It felt more mesmerizing than watching a playoff game.
Then, we blinked. Each of us walked away, deep into our private nighttimes, exposed, striped bare.
The next day, when the neighbor's kid honked his horn, I shouted out my office window. "Hey! That's enough!"
Summer has uncovered a new me.
Ethan Gilsdorf lives in Somerville. He's writing a book, "Escape Artists," about fantasy entertainment subcultures in America. He can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
