Part of a Community (no more crowded loneliness)

Living in a community where most people know someone who knows you is like living aboard a ship: there is not much about your character that is not known to others.

One thing I have really enjoyed about being repatriated to Birmingham is working within the community where I was reared.  Unlike the San Francisco Bay Area, where I never met anyone I knew from youth or had any prior connection to them or their family, here it is common to have connections to people you meet and work with every day.  I imagine it is not too dissimilar to living aboard a large ship in a fleet.

It was strange living in California.  I might meet or interview someone but never had any way to verify who or what they said as true.  Of course today, with social media and tools like Google, you may be able to find out more about that person than before, but nothing beats being able to call up a friend, relative, or acquaintance and ask, “What can you tell be about Billy Bob?”  In this town, a person’s name and reputation is negotiable currency in friendships, business, and civic involvement.

Also, unlike big urban areas where people dare not look other in the eye on the sidewalk, people here are friendly, saying hello, and look you in the eye.   Instead of the crowded loneliness of a faceless, expressionless city, here there is the sense we are all part of the community, that what one does affects another.  And that is true; connections abound all over the place here.

For example, the guy from whom I rent a storage unit is the father of a life-long friend—so I guess I am helping pay for her son’s college education?  A coworker has been friends with my parents for decades, and his mother a close friend of my wife—coincidently.  Or take the case of my daughter: one of her first friends she made after we moved back happened to be the niece of a close friend I had at the same age—and my friend was the son of one of my mom’s friends when she was my age and the same thing happened in the two other generations before her: five generations of friendships in one single family line!  And what’s sad is I do not believe that could even happen now in nearly all cities around this nation.

I love the sense of community and the ties to it!