E’s back

This is a story about E’s return and also about his back, his actual, physical back — his spine. E is a former neighbor who returned to the street this morning. I knew his arrival was imminent. It was hard to focus on my yoga practice because I sensed at any moment he could ring the doorbell, and I would be unprepared for him.

E gets the heebie jeebies in a messy house, and my house is beyond messy at the moment. Therefore, I couldn’t in good faith welcome him in. Thus, my nervousness. Once, in my kitchen, he opened a drawer, probably seeking a wine pull, and practically passed out.

“I don’t know how you live that way,” he said, shuddering, as he quickly shut the offending drawer. I opened it later and tried to look at it objectively, critically. It wasn’t perfect, that’s true, not organized, I guess. A jumble of assorted kitchen implements. Maybe a few rubber bands. But not offensive. Not dirty, filled with crumbs, or crawling with ants. I’d seen worse.

No, E is particular about these sorts of things, a bit OCD.

He’s zany too, and I did expect him to show up at my door with his forceful personality, just as he had nearly twenty years previous when I first met him. We were the young families on the block then. I had toddlers. Maybe an infant, when E and his family moved into the house down the street with the old fig tree in back.

In those days, we were a good American neighborhood. Kind to one another, but not in each other’s business — respectful of borders and boundaries of all kinds.

When E knocked on my door the first time, it was a summer evening. The light was diminishing. The sky was a soft pink. The mountain against which our neighborhood huddled was a rich mosaic of ochres, roses, and deep purples that changed by the moment, gilded by the last bright rays of a sun beginning to slip beneath the edge of the earth.

I opened the door to a bald man with eager hazel eyes and a slightly jumpy demeanor.

He said, “Can I use your bathroom?”

It sounded like an emergency. I was startled, taken aback, even alarmed, but there was something reassuring, innocent, and a little droll about the man, and I found myself stuttering, “Yes, sure… it’s down that hall, to the right…” and he was off like a shot.

When he returned, he simply said, “Thanks. Popsicles. On the street. 20 minutes,” and was gone.

I watched him depart in a cross between a lope and a skedaddle. I was mystified, amused, befuddled.

But, I duly called the kids. “Kids? Kids!” and found myself repeating, “Popsicles on the street! 20 minutes!”

Twenty minutes later, we set off down the street to where I could see a knot of kids surrounding a man — the man who had just used my toilet without so much as an introduction — dropping plastic-wrapped popsicles to the mass of uprisen hands.

My kids happily joined the fray.

That was our introduction to E, and the beginning of our friendship.

Before he arrived, we were friends with the other families on the block. Sure we were. We thought we were. We greeted one another, waved when they drove by, and occasionally engaged in small talk in front of our gardens. But, we didn’t hang out. We didn’t eat together, have parties, vacation together, confide the realities of our lives. We were engaged most likely in unconscious versions of keeping up with the Jones’. Keep your driveway clean, bring your trash cans in, behave, don’t step on other peoples’ lawns.

With E’s arrival, all bets were off.

He’d show up unannounced at the oddest times with similar pronouncements until he wore us all down, and we began to adopt his behaviors, running over for butter or milk regularly on weekend mornings and staying for a cup of coffee. Then for lunch.

Once, on an brutally hot summer day, we huddled together in shade of a stand of tall agave trees in another neighbor’s yard with our feet in the sprinkler for hours. Drinking gin and tonics and cooling our feet — 6 or 8 paris of feet reaching together to this pool of cool relief that did wonders. I’ll never forget how surprised I was at the realization that if we just kept our feet in the cool sprinkler, we would stay cool. We spent the entire day like that.

By the time the kids were in elementary school, we were solidly in a pattern. Three or four families dined together at least once a week, sometimes more. It was casual, nothing scheduled or organized. Whoever felt they had enough food and energy would send the call out, and we’d descend on that household.

The mass of kids — how many? 7, 8, 9, or 10 kids, depending, would band together the way kids do and begin their antics — sliding down stairs on pillows, roaming the twilit street, racing down the warm, tarry asphalt on all manner of scooters, bicycles, plastic big wheel-type vehicles, chipped red wagons, and the like. The kids would play dress up, emerging regally in pink satins with sparkly veils, crowns, and tiaras.

There were many accidents. Skinned knees, spills, fights, cut lips, the usual.

In the summer, we’d pull the fire ring out and place it in the middle of the street. All the neighbors would come out — singles, couples, those whose kids had left the nest long ago. The elders who remembered when the Oakland Zoo was located on the mountain behind us, and you could hear the lions roaring as you drifted off to sleep.

I credit E with creating this idyllic, magical environment for our children as they grew up. E, and the fact that our street — Guido Street — is a cul-de-sac. Cars not belonging to trusted neighbors rarely made their way down our street, but when they did, it was scary because our kids weren’t used to traffic on our street. They considered the warm, rough asphalt in front of their houses an extension of their front yards. It was a play space.

When a foreign car did take that corner to barrel down our street — and barrel they did because they couldn’t tell there was no thruway — E and P — another beloved Guido dad — would holler, “Car! Kids, car!” and then “Slow down!” to the offending driver.

After a time, someone got or found tall, heavy orange cones, and we’d pull those out of the neighbor’s garden that was closest to the main thoroughfare and block our own street off as the kids played in the summer evenings, pulling them aside to let only residents in as needed.

We hung together for years in this way. Dinners and block parties turned into vacations. Every Labor Day for several years, we rented a house in Richardson Bay, on the shore of South Lake Tahoe.

We parented together, raised our kids together. When the kids were in their merry, ragtag band, the adults were free. Free to talk, enjoy a cocktail or a glass of wine, play poker, and share stories of our lives.

After some years of this, E was offered a job in his hometown of Eureka. He took it, and the family moved away. But, we were able to keep the feeling he gave us, the informality. This was E’s gift to us. And we were able to extend it to the new family who moved in. Our friends were envious of our block. Everyone wanted what we had, and no wonder.

Recently, my daughter said wistfully that the most peaceful, happy time in her life was those summer nights on Guido, when her village was banded together, when the adults just by virtue of being together, by pooling resources, by watching out for one another’s kids, created a kind of forcefield that resonated with love and protection.

Shortly after E left, he was celebrating his birthday on a boat with friends on the north coast and was jokingly pushed off the side into the water. As a joke. For fun. The problem was, unbeknownst to the jokester, E was already having mysterious problems with his spine and was in the process of trying to identify the problem.

The push exacerbated the problem hundred-fold, and E began a long, grueling journey into chronic pain and debilitating spinal degeneration. He’s been on heavy duty opioids for years and has withstood five surgeries, two on the neck and three on the lower back. Now he has an electrical spinal stimulator in his lower back that I had thought was working. I had thought I heard good news in recent years, that his pain was abating, that the stimulator was working.

E is back in the neighborhood this morning. He’s only here for a visit, for a couple of days. I just saw him. He’s the same old E in many ways. The same wry humor. When I saw him, I made to hug him. He held his hand up and said, “No. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me at all. Hands down. Hands at your sides.” Then, he tentatively approached me. He hugged me feebly. Then, he kissed me softly on both cheeks and carefully stood back.

We talked about this and that. His voice was strangely stifled, like there’s an anvil on his chest, like he’s not getting enough air. Like he’s in severe pain. I said, “E, why are you talking like that?” He said, “I’m in incredible pain. All the time.”

Later in the conversation, he said he was in a terrible, terrible mood, but there was a mischievous light in his eyes that I remembered. His daughter G, who was 3 when they left, is 16 now, tall and lithe and beautiful. E can’t get enough air because it hurts to breathe.

I brought him a cup of strong, French press coffee that he seemed to enjoy. He gave me a pound of bacon he’d picked up in Watsonville on the way here from his sister’s house.

I told him I’m making him a cake for the party in his honor at the pool today at 4. I said I thought I’d make a coconut cake. He looked appalled and said, “No, no. Anything but coconut.”

I love E for his honesty. There is something about his manner that breaks down barriers between people. This is an homage to E and to what he did for our neighborhood. He showed us how to connect. How to really connect. And now, he can’t be touched. He can’t be touched at all.

He said he had to lie down. We agreed I would make a chocolate cake with mocha icing. I made to go.

He kissed the air on either side of my cheeks and said, “Thanks for the cup of mud,” as he hobbled to the couch.