Party People

A few days ago, at the culmination of my girlfriend's big move across Big City, we went to the block party that was occurring in her new neighborhood. Simultaneously, while we had been busy arranging, packing, and moving all of several years of her life and furniture, a few neighbors in her new neighborhood were planning a so-called "block" party, which pretty much turned out to be an excuse to meet all of the neighbors. It was pure coincidence that it the party was on the last day of my girlfriend's move.

Being a small town kind of guy, spending much of my previous years only hearing about block parties in movies - the medium of our age - I wasn't sure what to expect. Essentially, several older people who could be classified as hippies (and I use the term with a marker of kindness) had cooked a few hot dogs and bought a potato salad to feed an overwhelming number of neighborhood children who spontaneously melted into the streets without their parent's accompaniment. Therefore, much of the party was spent entertaining the children with a pinata and humoring them with candy. Fortunately, the street where the party was set-up had been blocked off at both ends; otherwise, the children surely would have been confronted with their doom in a sudden accident as they were obliviously careening around on bicycles and scooters in a dizzying frenzy. Chaos would be a kind word for the hour and a half that we spent there. Still, I maintained a certain equanimity in the midst of it being the kind of guy who has taken "go with the flow" as a personal motto.

I went away from the experience thinking about the type of people I met there - one was hippy guy who wore a grateful dead T-shirt and seemed nervous; the other was woman who talked about her years being abused by her ex-husband, but who also loved to read true crime stories; and the other was a young woman who had come abruptly to yell at someone she thought had yelled at her own kid (Noone had yelled, and if she had been there with her child, she might have known that). Sometimes it seems difficult for people to get along, and more than anything else, the recognition of the enduring conflicts we, as a society, are still struggling with, makes me feel old and very tired.