7-April-99 Community

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Working in Newton rather than commuting makes a big difference. In my past jobs I've felt a lot more as though I slept in Newton than as if I leved here. Since I've spent my working day here too, it feels entirely different. It's not totally logical, since I'm inside a building most of the time either way. Probably the biggest factor is that I keep bumping into people. A man who used to be a back-fence neighbor works in the same neighborhood as I. I run into him at lunchtime every so often and find out what movie his daughter, who used to star in elementary school musicals, is editing now. A couple of weeks ago I stopped my bike a block from the post office, yelled, "Hi, Millie," and got a big hug from a woman my mother's age who used to be the synagogue youth group director when we lived in Lexington forty years ago. Yesterday on my way home from work I caught up to another bicyclist and realized it was a neighbor who works two blocks from me at the school department headquarters. He has bicycled to work for years, and it's his recommended route home that I was following. This morning a woman yelled, "Dean" and I stopped to chat; it was someone who carpooled our daughter to nursery school, oh, probably in 1980. A city of 80,000 people just isn't that big when you're outdoors in it for three quarters of an hour a day.

Being on foot or on a bicycle helps a lot. I have a different sense of being somewhere when I get there by bicycle or on foot from when I travel by car. In a car you're carrying your own air and music around with you, and the world could be just projected on the windows. After my junior year in college I drove from Massachusetts to California with some other students, and we crossed the entire state of Indiana without stopping the car. I was never sure I was really in Indiana at all on that trip. Even if I could bicycle for that long (forget that many miles) without stopping I would be sure I was really there, wherever it was.

Darn, it just gets too late too soon. There was something to say about how constraints help creativity. It's actually easier to write if someone gives you a topic than if you just have to write a paragraph about whatever you want; easier to draw something if you have to use just two crayons than a whole box; and so on. It must be that way with Passover and cooking. I don't have any favorite Passover recipes, but my Arlene's mother used to feel frustrated that Passover was only one week and she had more good recipes than she could make in that week. Make them another week? No way. It's a rare Passover recipe that's good enough that you'd make it any other time of the year. Giving up everything with yeast or normal flour in it for a week probably doesn't sound like a big deal if you gave up television for Lent when you were a kid, but it makes more of a difference than you'd realize. The two things that make the most difference to me are, first, just having to remember not to look in the vending machine or to stop at the bakery, and, second, beer. Passover is just the time of year when it starts getting warm enough that you get thirsty.