“Communities are where we find them,” by Tom Portwood*

With a poet’s eye for telling detail and a warm heart for everyone, Tom Portwood captures the temper of the times and our longing for community as well as anyone. Here’s one of his  Sunday meditations on our shared journey towards a better world. ed.

I took a walk around my Modesto neighborhood this afternoon, a typical Sunday in so many ways. In a nearby park, a young mother was watching three or four kids yelling among themselves as they ran around a fake boulder embedded in sand by the swings. A baby was halfheartedly toying with a rattle in a stroller by the mother’s side. The mother wore a hijab, nodded and smiled at me as she pushed the stroller by the bench where I sat reading a book.

A few minutes later, a slight breeze fluttered the branches in a stand of ash trees as I walked across the park’s wide grassy field. Across the street, a man and his wife were clipping hedges alongside their driveway, their neighbor two houses down was mowing his lawn. Two kids bicycled by, their tires describing great, lazy arcs across the road. An elderly man nodded at me as I walked along Rumble. Having had its landscaping recently freshened up, the elementary school next to the park looked better than it had in years.

As I turned the corner onto Coffee Road, I saw another elderly man, someone I recognized. The fellow was pushing a shopping cart crammed with plastic bottles and aluminum cans – working his heart out on this day of rest for a couple of extra dollars. We stopped and chatted for a few minutes — we’ve passed each other on the street many times over the last several months. His name is Armando. Like me, Armando has problems with his back. We chatted about that, joked about getting old and getting by. Unlike me, Armando toils hard every day to get by, courageously, under a hot sun or drenched by rain. Here on the street, we are neighbors. We shake hands in parting, as neighbors do.

Communities are where we find them, where we look for them, if we look for them. Three times a week, I catch the 32 bus around noon to go to the downtown library where I do a little volunteer tutoring. At that hour, the bus riders are mostly regulars, mostly, like me, a little older, a little weakened by disease or injury or chronic health problems. Most of us require a little hardware to help us get around — motorized wheelchairs, walkers, oxygen tanks, or, like me, one of the luckier ones, a walking cane.

Occasionally, a caregiver will board the bus with a rider who is more acutely ill and accompany her client to his destination. And there’s a smattering of younger riders, too – young moms with wide-eyed toddlers in tow, grandchildren off on an adventure to a downtown park with a doting grandmother.

But many board the bus, greying, missing an arm or a leg, or both legs. Always smiling, always cheerfully nodding at the rest of us, at familiar faces. The bus stops and picks up passengers at Marple Manor, the Senior Center, Ralston Towers, deposits many of the riders at Memorial Hospital, Sutter Gould, and the various health services on Scenic Drive. For most of the riders, negotiating through the physical challenges of the day will be strenuous, at best. But on the bus they briskly chat among themselves, rarely knowing each other’s names, but sharing a moment or two about the weather, or how reassuring it is to see so many kids racing across the playground as the bus trundles by an elementary school. The bus driver often chimes in, takes special care with every passenger who needs assistance. If someone drops a package or has trouble pulling the cord to signal a stop, other riders help out. The sense of community on that bus, of real warmth and graciousness and caring for the other fellow is visceral. It’s a ride I always look forward to.

In a way, we are all riders on that bus. All of us must look out for each other, especially now. We are the community we are all searching for. It’s right here — right now — for we are always among neighbors.

* I wrote the above short piece five days after the presidential election in 2016.  While the traumas and challenges of the past eight years have revealed Americans are more divided than ever, if we are ever going to tackle the huge problems and injustices we face as a country we must embrace the gift that we are living among neighbors, that change will only occur if we work within our communities to make it happen.