i saw the future, and...

with my friends off playing in europe, and mb off to west virginia for a week of mountain biking with the guys, i am having an uneventful memorial day weekend. it's been very relaxing - shopping with my former roommate for shoes/jewelry/etc for her wedding, biking on the lakeshore path, making plans to grill out with a couple of friends and neighbors. three cheers to my upstairs neighbors for seeing me waddling back from the store, arms loaded with groceries (why were my arms so loaded with groceries when i am by myself this week? this is what happens going to the store hungry), and promptly call out "hey jo-na, can we get you a beer? kids, move the sprinkler for a minute so she can get inside." and four cheers (is that a term?) for said same neighbor, for not waiting for me to finish unloading groceries, but instead knocking on the door to see if i needed my beer *before* coming outside to socialize.

so yes, there are nice neighbors in the city. and yes, these are the same neighbors whose major hobby on first moving to the neighborhood was sitting on their deck watching drug deals. but these blocks have changed a lot in the last few years - many of the nearby projects have been torn down, and plans are underway for a mixed single-family/rental apartment/section 8/townhouse kind of development. in the meantime, we mostly live in the center of empty lots surrounded by security fences. although technically we live in little italy, mb and i have dubbed the neighborhood "Swath Of Destruction." our directions to friends driving in from out of town go like this:

"west on roosevelt thru x lights... when you get to a totally empty stretch with a boarded up check-cashing place and liquor store, with some teenagers loitering on the corner, look for the lonely little condos in the center of a Swath Of Destruction and that's us."

as we await the inevitable progress of housing developments (meanwhile taking advantage of the cheaper rent), in the center of Swath Of Destruction sits 1950. i spent yesterday afternoon drinking beer with the neighbors, watching the kids run through the sprinkler in the front yard. one of the girls is clearly the alpha; she decides when we are playing little mermaid, and when we are playing beauty parlor, and when we are too cold for the sprinkler, and when we are tired and curling up like burritos in our towels on the sidewalk. the other kids mostly accept these instructions. the parents, clearly more used to this than i am, seem completely at peace ignoring the repeated insistence that they please stop the yard work and give back the sprinkler.

it occurs to me that once Swath Of Destruction is re-built, there will be more strangers, more traffic, more coming and going in our admittedly-rented section of urban renewal. it won't be as easy to know all of the neighbors with more dynamic moving in and out. so i'm a little sad to know that Progress is coming. but i'm even more sad to realize that kids' personalities take after their parents -- i commented to alpha's mom that i was that kid growing up. she told me that when grandma picks up the kids from preschool, she looks in the room and gets deja vu because she sees so much of her mother's personality in little alpha.

mb and i are not planning on having children any time immediately, but i am having visions of an imaginative but talkative bossy little girl whose hobbies are the words "why?" and "let's do it my way!" i don't think penance will help, but to my brother, i'm sorry for all the times i made you play house instead of war with your robots. i'll get mine in due time. progress is inevitable.