I don’t Know your Name, but I know Your Dog…

A neighborhood does not begin with a monument sign at the entrance. It begins with a wave.

The Grapevine

There is a man on my street who raises his cigar at me. Not a wave exactly. A lift. Two inches, maybe three, and a nod that costs him nothing and somehow means everything.

I don't know his name.

I have been walking this neighborhood nearly every day for years, and I have accumulated — without trying, and mostly without formally introducing myself — an entire cast of people whose absence I would notice.

There's the lady across the street from my house who I always run into walking her dogs. The bible minister who never misses an opportunity to dispense a little scripture. The woman I keep crossing paths with at the park, whose dog is so old he's earned his freedom from the leash entirely. This little-old dog is content to sniff his way from one bush to the next in no particular hurry. Isn't it just like dogs to get us to appreciate the little things, like a warm summer's day with a slight breeze rustling through the bushes and trees?

I do all my best thinking while walking, and here is what I have come to appreciate: a neighborhood does not begin with a monument sign at the entrance. Or even a well-organized block party. It begins with a wave.

The wave, a smile, a tip of the cigar, is the smallest possible unit of belonging. It is a person deciding, at almost no cost, that you are not a stranger.

What is strange about it is how fast it cements into an obligation. Wave at someone three mornings running and you have yourself an unwritten agreement. I see you, and I'm glad I did. Skip a morning and they will wonder whether they did something wrong. Skip a week and you'll both start to wonder.

We call ourselves a community as though it were a thing that must be written down on the county register, but it is not. It is an overall sense of belonging that compounds: one wave, one lift of a cigar (or coffee mug) or dog leash at a time — mostly below the level of anyone else noticing.

These are not friendships, per se. I could not tell you what most of these people do for a living, who their household consists of, or whether they are going through something that warrants a friend. They have entire lives behind the wave that I'm not privy to. And that's ok.

That's more than ok. Because it is not nothing, either. It is the first foot of foundation for the possibility of friendship. It's the community plan before the developer breaks ground. It is the realm of pure potential that's quietly there before your neighbor ever brings over a plate of tacos or fixes your lawnmower for you.

We spend a lot of this issue talking about what we are building for the next generation: public ways, fiscal planning, classrooms, backpacks. Sometimes big machinery is involved, and the yellow vests mobilize for a major project that takes weeks, months, or even years to materialize. Anything worth building is worth taking your time to build. That's real. But I would offer that none of it matters in a town where nobody looks up and waves.

Take the man on my street, enjoying a cigar from his front porch. It was only ever the lift and the nod — no names, just a polite "good evening," just the two of us agreeing that the other one exists. Until it wasn't. Until it became more. When we finally traded a few pleasantries and I learned his name at last, I was rewarded for being so bold as to say hello: he reached into his pocket and tossed me a cigar.

Thanks, friend.