The Street - A Composite Sketch (33)

Not a very long street, just off a major arterial, it is shaped like a question mark. At the conclusion of the bulge it meanders into another street. One half of the street backs onto a heavily wooded ravine, a neighbourhood treasure, though few of the street's residents quite recognize its value, nor make use of its propinquity. It cleanses the air everyone breathes, it hosts birds and wildlife and presents a treasury of wildflowers throughout the seasons. At one time the street, part of a larger suburban community, shared a small-town address. It has long since been subsumed into the greater national capital of the country, through a wide-ranging amalgamation of communities and even farms. The street and the houses on it were built two and a half decades ago. The domiciles are comprised mostly of single-family, detached dwellings, with a handful of semis verging on the main thoroughfare. Many of the residents are the original home purchasers. They would comprise roughly 50% of the residents of the street. The semis appear to have changed hands far more often than the detached homes. And those homes that have been re-sold have often enjoyed a succession of owners. The original home owners who moved into their houses when their children were small have mostly bid farewell to now-grown children. The street represents an amalgam of family types, and there is a significant percentage at this time, of retired people, singly and in couples who, though their houses are meant for family occupation, still opt to remain in their too-large, but comfortable and familiar and valued homes. It is a very quiet street, with little traffic other than those who live there. The house fronts are diverse, and attractive. Most residents take care of their homes, seeing them as their primary investments. Furnaces have been replaced, and air conditioners, and also windows. Kitchens and bathrooms have been remodelled, and people have added decks and occasionally airy 'summer houses' to the backs of their homes. One-third of the homes boast swimming pools, in-ground and above-ground. Most people take pride in their properties, and feel they must achieve lawns that are weedless and smoothly green. Some painstakingly remove weeds by hand in the spring, others hire lawn-care companies to spread chemicals on their lawns. Invariably, the people who look after their own gardens and lawns have superior gardens and lawns. Each house has a large tree planted in front; maples, ash,crabapples, spruce or pine, fully mature. This is a community that is truly mixed, representing people from around the world, come to Canada as immigrants, settled and making the most of opportunities open to all its citizens in a free and open society noted for its pluralism and dedication to fair representation. There are the extroverts and the introverts, those who prefer not to mingle, others who do. They are herewith loosely sketched:

This is the Thirty-third part of the anatomy of The Street.

They were most certainly there, it was their house, they had bought it and lived in it, but they might just as well not have been there for all that anyone in the neighbourhood knew about them, thought about them, saw of them. This was a tight-faced pair of like-thinking people, a husband and a wife, both working somewhere, and earning a tidy living together, and obviously seeing no value whatever in getting to know their neighbours. Outright spurning all attempts at casually friendly encounters.

Turning a blank face of unrecognition on neighbours whom they had lived beside for years, they would not even bother acknowledging offhand greetings. Which puzzled other people greatly. And caused them to metaphorically shrug off the very existence of this disengaged pair. For some reason socially estranged from everyone. Never even was anyone found to be visiting with them. If they had extended family it was a mystery where they might be.

And that was precisely how this family appeared to like things. No one meddling in their affairs. No one knowing the least little detail about them. Other families might put up election signs favouring one candidate, one political party or another during elections, but never they. Other families would invariably put up displays during the Christmas season, bright lights that spoke to their religion and the foundation of their values.

It was conjectured at first that perhaps they had moved to the area from a small, cloistered community, and had chafed at the fact that everyone in small communities was aware of everyone else's background and the close personal details of their lives. And that, as one wag had it, they'd had it with communality and sought instead to conserve their privacy by extending toward one and all a big, unfriendly raspberry.

That was their right, after all. No one, most certainly, must need feel any kind of collegiality toward the people among whom they live. Although it certainly makes life more pleasant. Those who went out canvassing for charitable donations at various times throughout the year, soon learned to bypass that house. It was abundantly clear that the couple meant to cloister themselves away from all human contact other than what they mustered toward one another.

And their relationship one to the other also remained a mystery since they seldom appeared in public together. After they had lived in their house for a number of years they had two children, one quickly after the other, two boys. Nothing seemed to change. The boys, as infants and on into early childhood were farmed out to caregivers. And when they began school and were yet in their early grades they became latchkey children; on their own in their house until their parents returned from wherever it was they laboured.

Like their parents the children never did mingle with other children on the street. They were remote, blank-faced little automatons, or so it seemed to onlookers. As the boys grew older and attended high school, other children on the street spoke of the strange alienation of the boys, who, although they most surely recognized children living in the neighbourhood, never gave so much as a nod to them, passing in the school hallways.

The two boys seemed not even to like one another. The older one ordered the younger one around on those rare occasions when they were seen in public, and the younger one curtly swore at the older one. Their voices would exchange opinions of one another and steadily rise into a shrill crescendo of blame and dislike. Objects could be heard, hurtled by one or another, in the garage.

Finally, it was rumoured and then authenticated that the boys were skinheads. Racists. There was no indication that their parents were involved in anything like that. No one had any idea, for example, that the parents were white supremacists, although their rigid, unbending manner toward others might have pointed in that direction. If the boys acted out their racist inclinations, it was never on the street.

At one point they appeared to have inducted another boy on the street into a kind of cabal, the older son of a military family living several houses up the street. That family eventually moved out to Western Canada, although their sons were left to continue their education, boarding with family friends. But this family remains on the street, although not of the street. More latterly two motorcycles have appeared and the now-grown young men are heard zooming off to some destination.

It's not as though the family neglects their property so that it represents an eyesore on a street of well-cared-for homes and properties. They are as meticulous about how their home presents on its exterior to the curious eye as anyone else on the street. The lawn is always mowed, there is never litter left on the property. In the winter months someone is always scrupulously shovelling snow off the driveway. For all of that, it's as though a phantom family exists; there, but not there.

The family remains an anomaly on a street where most of the residents exhibit a good degree of respect for one another, and many are inclined to be personal and friendly, valuing the good opinion of their neighbours. One suspects that such loners with their bitter personalities exist anywhere and everywhere among others, deliberately setting themselves apart. Whether they are social misfits, alienated from society or sociopathic misanthropic is anyone's guess. Is there much difference?

c. 2009 Rita Rosenfeld