It Takes a Long Time

Some conversations with friends who have recently moved, yesterday's Round Robin "Village" topic, and occasional comments on blogs by women who pretty much stay at home and build their entire lives around their families, have had me thinking about how we build community.  Those thoughts presuppose a wish to participate in a real-life community of  people and buildings and spaces, which does not seem to be a universally shared desire.  I can only speak from the experience of someone who values community intensely, and who wonders how I would go about building a context for myself if I were to move.  So . . . just some meandering thoughts:

I think that I wanted friends as soon as I knew that friends existed.  I grew up way out in the country, and my first companions were animals -- real and stuffed -- and my younger brothers, who weren't of much use from a conversational standpoint.  What a delight school was!  And although I had the same struggles with cliques and acceptance that every child faces, when I reached boarding school in seventh grade I began to learn to subsitute friendship for family and to live in close-knit communities, with all the good and bad that they entail.  One of my aunts, who to this day lives on farmland far from the city to which my uncle commutes, asked me once how I could stand to live where I do.  "All those years in dorms?" I wondered.

One of my friends, a politically active individual in our small city, an inner-ring suburb, says that it took her four years -- four years after moving here to begin to feel a part of things.  (She said this is the context of a discussion some time ago in which several of us were contemplating what it would be like to move somewhere else.)   She is an extremely outgoing, engaged, and opinionated person -- someone who has no trouble interjecting herself into a conversation or situation.  And when she arrived here, she had six young children, which gave her multiple opportunities for involvement in all kinds of places. Yet it took her four years.  I wonder whether I could manage it in that time frame as an empty-nester old fogie.

I remember a woman in a moms' group -- that would have been exactly 21 years ago! -- saying that when she first found herself at home with a small baby, she tried to "pick up" other moms, in the grocery and at the park.  We all laughed with deep appreciation -- wasn't that exactly what we were doing in that group?

Throughout much of my life, I've been able to become part of a community because I've been in an environment where it exists -- a school or a workplace -- and there are usually a few people with whom I feel some kind of ineffable bond.  One of my frustrations with my current workplace is that I am in a most definite minority, culturally and religiously, and the people with whom I feel the most affinity are 25 years younger than I -- so that while we share political and professional views and frustrations, we don't share a social life.

My group of closest friends comes from my former church -- clearly a result of almost incomprehensible serendipity.  We all turned up at about the same time in a large church -- meaning, in that case, a church that encompassed all sorts of religious, political, and social leanings -- and we found each other through a neighborhood community program there, were all parents of young children, were mostly  without extended families in town, and were all in search of a life of faith in a questioning and open-minded way.  We were able to connect on so many different levels in so many different circumstances -- how lucky was that?  As the religious right comes more and more to the forefront of American life, I realize that if I were to move to a new geographic area, I would have to do extensive research before I could walk into the door of a church and hope to feel at home -- but the first time, I was certainly no more than an accidental tourist. 

And having switched churches, I do have some sort of a gauge for estimating when community begins to feel real.  I attended my current church for nearly 10 years before making an official change of affiliation -- at first I really wanted to be left alone to worship in peace and do some internal work.  But as I began to indicate an interest in becoming involved, it took no time at all for the phone to start ringing and, once I became an official member, I found plenty of places in which to build friendships. 

In the end, I  guess, it's a combination of personal openness and geographic fortune.  I know a couple of women, one in my neighborhood and one at work, with whom I would probably be engaged in very close friendships, but for the aura of private space with which each of them surrounds herself.  I recognize it, because sometimes I encircle myself with the same wall, and there's nothing to do but respect it and enjoy them to the extent that they do extend themselves.  And I know that there are locales in which, were I to move there, I would be lucky to find even one true friend, places where I would be Hannah in The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

I have no conclusions.  But I do wonder.  I would like to move to the edge of the water somewhere -- but would I have friends?