The Bigger It Is, The Smaller It Feels

I've been ruminating on this for a while now and it has been sneaking into my blog. I find it paradoxical that we've moved into the city core from the metro edges, only to find that we have a tighter, more hometown flavored life now than ever before. Here are some cases in point:

1. Our neighborhood has a beat cop. I haven't met him yet, but I know his first name.
2. The gas station attendants know us as neighborhood locals. They ask how we're doing as we fill up our cars. When we need air for tires, they give us tokens because "neighbors can use the air machine for free."
3. The neighborhood Boy Scout troop connects us throughout the central SE by way of professional contacts, with doctors, restaurateurs, sewer workers, lawyers and architects.
4. I read the neighborhood newspaper, the Southeast Examiner only to find long-lost college classmates quoted in articles - and living only blocks away!
5. My son gets to meet the mayor...and give a speech to the Portland City Council.  Among a handful of things that makes R stand out to the mayor is the uniqueness of our location...right off Peacock Lane
6. More than one restaurant in the neighborhood not only remembers us but tends to know what we're going to order -- we have 'usuals' !!
7. A neighborhood meat wholesaler has offered to let us by at restaurant pricing, just because we live in the neighborhood and are active in the neighborhood community.
8. Political candidates come to our door. No, Really. We get a lot of door-to-door canvassing.
9. We shop in the same Fred Meyer store where Grandpa Jerry worked as he finished school. There's a multi-generational thing there, nowadays.

All this, while we live, flat-out, in the city. Oh sure, you might be thinking to yourself, you're in a neighborhood, so you've got neighborhood stuff. Well, here's my list of big city things we live with that are of note:

• I can take any one of four bus routes to other places in the city, all within  two blocks of our front door.
• The library is two blocks away.
• Things that do not require driving to access:
  
  • The airport ($2.00 each way, no parking necessary)
  • Ballet (both performances and school)
  • theater,
  • downtown
  • mall shopping
  • nightspots
  • professional sports
  • family-style movie theater
  • three different high schools
  • groceries
  • pharmacy
  • garden store
  • gas station
  • dance studio
  • play ground
  • Boy Scouts
  • dozens of restaurants
  • Kinko's
  • Health Care (docs, naturopaths, optometrists, etc.)
  • City Library
  • Banks
  • outdoor produce stand
  • haircuts
    
• Come time for high school, we can choose between the neighborhood high school, or three close-at-hand magnet schools: technical; arts & dance; business & commerce
• We are equidistant to three universities: Reed College; Portland State; University of Portland; and a seminary. All three are close enough that a child could live at home while attending.
• Our in-town fireworks display, on the Willamette River, is a bike ride away -- 35 blocks.

Here's the paradox. When we lived in the 'burbs, the societal arguments for doing so often included 'sense of community.' Okay, I'll accept that. EXCEPT that I never had a beat cop I knew by name. I never had a candidate come to my door. The mayor didn't recognize my kid and know where he lived. Shoot, I even recognize the three guys who scavenge returnables out of our recycling every Thursday evening, before the garbage trucks get there.

This is the sort of 'know everybody' stuff you expect from a small town -- Myrtle Point, say, or Pacific City. Only it's happening deep within the one town that contains half of the state's population.... it's certainly not happening in the suburbs, where we're told we'll get that sort of lifestyle.

There really isn't a way to wrap this set of observations up; no ribbon of prose to tie around this blog entry like a bow and turn it into an essay. It's just a societal paradox I need to put forward. I'll close with a question:

We're learning that the post-WW2 belief that our cars would change the world turned out to be all too true, but in dangerous and unanticipated ways. Our 'alternative energy' societal thinking marks not NEW thinking, but rather a return to sustainable OLD thinking. Does it not follow, then, that the post-WW2 thinking about suburbs, and the aloofness they built into themselves, is yet another body of societal thinking that is changing?

I certainly feel like my SE Portland experience has re-shaped my thinking.