waking city

Getting up in the morning in the city is different, I have discovered, from waking up in the country. These close quarters are such a different environment. One I wanted to taste. One I needed to try. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the general niceness of the people in my city. I realize every place has a slightly different feel, and likely varies by neighborhood. But there is something here that changes how we forgive each other, and release one another from conformity, I find.

Maybe living on top of one another forces us to be a bit more tolerant? The dream of the big house in the country still stands, more trees than cars, and air without exhaust particles. But I felt that this was something important to experience. This closeness. Being so surrounded by others that you’re a part of this organism called city. And I think I can see now how people who grow up in it would feel as though they’d been cut off from their lifeblood were they removed from the pulse of this. The energy created by people existing together is a strange collective hum, a glow baked from the heat of so many warm hearts and breathing bodies.

In the country, where it’s woven in and out of fields and forests, the connect exists differently. Oh it is there, in the underbrush scurry of creatures, and the groaning leaning of trees in storms, in the ache and burst of the seasonal topography change where we all experience the feeling of anticipating birth and mourning death. It’s there in the lone, farm-field-nestled convenience store, in the smell of bonfires and clean air, and the folks across the street who bring you a box full of food when they have too much or know you’re in hard times.

I did not know that I’d feel the echo of that here, yet I’ve been met with great friendliness in this city. Something about facing the daily slog as a group makes us feel like real neighbors, like bar mates, familiar strangers. We share something. We’re all getting up for work, hoping our cars hang in there for a couple more years, greeting each other while walking dogs in our pajamas, wondering when that new Thai place down the road is going to open. There’s a daily awareness of each other that is so unavoidably much more in your face in the city. Of course this means the unpleasant as well: Crime, dirt, people mistreating each other, lost pets, broken windows, decay. But, life on earth predicates these symptoms. And without this grime and clutter, the sunset wouldn’t seem quite so bright. If we never collided, our lives would be but boring executions of plans, smoothly running plot outlines with underwhelming outcomes.

It’s good for us to experience each other. And what a curious way is this… living right up next to each other. Hearing each other swearing, fighting, loving, laughing. Smelling each other’s cooking. Folding laundry together. Saying good morning, discussing the weather, and then letting each other go about their day. A good collection of neighbors is perhaps a more fully functioning family than some people will ever experience.

Some will stay in this place forever, it is where they belong. But for those of us that come here, and may well one day leave, it is a boarding that we can gain great depths from. The camaraderie of living somewhere is a potent one that sticks long after people leave. Or they wouldn’t shout when the person on stage mentions thier old city, or get overly competitive come football season for a team they live on the other side of the country from. It’s a rite of passage that says you belonged somewhere, and you breathed it in, and your neighbors back there will always wonder how you’re doing these days.

All photos taken on morning dog walks around Long Beach. Sometimes half dressed in pajamas. Always greeting passersby.