Families are a curious bunch, full of love and hate, bluster and commitment. The sibling you’d do anything for one moment – you’d do anything to the next.
Neighborhoods are a lot like families. The good ones are hard to describe, other than to say they make life worth living. The bad ones; well, the TV news is filled with stories every day about the bad ones.
There’s something about our home here in East Dallas/Lakewood that keeps us here; most of us, anyway. Something about the odd and the scary and the wonderful that gives our life the daily salt and pepper you just can’t find in the suburbs.
Every day, the sun rises and sets on hard-working neighbors – both rich and poor of virtually every race – dedicated to the best for their children, the worst for criminals and a will to make City government work, if not for us, then for the next guy.
We asked writer Jim Schutze and photographer Robert Bunch to tell this tale in words and photos. Here’s what they say about our home.
I wish I could say no one in my house ever even thinks about leaving our neighborhood. It happens. It usually depends on who or what has just come to the front door. My wife and I work at home. We miss nothing.
I say who or what because not all of our visitors are human. We have visiting dog packs. Cats on tour. Raccoons. We see some animals on the porch that are of indistinct species. They may be cats that have been wild so long that they look sort of like raccoons. Or they may just be some very sorry looking raccoons.
I will say this: All my life before moving to East Dallas, I saw animals in the wild, animals at the zoo, animals in books. I never once saw an animal whose species I could not identify.
I don’t like it. It makes me uneasy. In the back of my mind, I worry that it may be something undiscovered. Or, worse – new.
The humans who come to the door present similar challenges. Most of them we know, and we dearly love and value their company, even when they visit us during working hours.
Some of them we do not know but we would be interested in getting to know.
A few of them – a very small percentage – we do not know, we are not interested in getting to know, and we are calling the police.
I will say this: All my life before moving to East Dallas, I answered the front door, and I said, “Hi, how are you?” or “I’m sorry, but we are not interested,” or “They live next door,” but before moving here, I never answered the door and said, “We are calling the police.”
A consequence of this kind of front-porch traffic is that you will never, ever, anywhere in America, find a more communicative or tight-knit neighborhood than the Bryan Parkway neighborhood.
Nothing gets by anybody. I would hate to be a door-to-door con man in this neighborhood. I’d starve to death.
In the meantime, we are bound by much more than mere adversity. One after another, the shared institutions of East Dallas play a key role in all our lives. Those of us who have been this way before rejoice when another household of doting post-‘60s, late-in-the-game parents with weird ideas send their first-born off to day-care at the East Dallas Y, where Val England and crew will begin to give the kid his or her first glimpses of civilized behavior.
We watch what the City does to or for the Lakewood Library as if we were watching over our own private property.
There is an equally proprietary interest in the comings and the goings of the stores – the expansion of the Minyard’s, the fate of the animals at the Lakewood Pet Center after the fire – as if these were somehow public institutions.
We relish the neighborhood rituals that put us all out on the street together with smiles on our faces – the Lakewood Fourth of July Parade, the Munger Place Home Tour, the Lakewood Preschool PTA Home Tour and Craft Fair. We trade inside tips on the good restaurants as if you could get rich eating there.
Maybe these things happen in the suburbs. Maybe there are streets where everybody knows everybody; where people tend to stay put over the years, where lives are interwoven in a rich fabric of shared experience, mutual self-interest and sheer gossipy nosy curiosity.
But here’s what happens whenever we have the conversation at our house – the question that arises:
Where?
You tell me. Is there a place we could go where we could take all of the wonderful things about East Dallas with us, hang on to all of it and get rid of the bad parts? Especially those little whatever-they-ares that look like cats?
Because I’m packin’. I’m ready to go. I’m not a masochist. I would love to never ever again in my life have to open the front door and say, “Hi. The police are on their way to arrest you.”
But I don’t believe it. Nobody at my house does. It’s not that the bad things are the tie that binds. We still intend to get rid of the bad things.
It’s just that, in the extreme tidiness of the other places where one might live, we sniff sterility. We don’t really believe they know and care about each other.
It’s reverse snobbery, I know. And it’s probably not totally true. But it’s what happens to us. We have the conversation, and it always goes like this:
“We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“Fine. Where?”
Long silence.
“Williamson Play Park?”
