I went to the computer this morning and found myself growling, “The Internet connection is down *again*?”
My husband’s first job out of grad school was with Digital Equipment Corp in New Hampshire. Merrimack was a boom town; when we wanted to buy a house, we had to pick a lot and wait for it to be built. One benefit of that is that everybody else in the neighborhood was as new as we were and curious about meeting everybody else.
One couple, a few doors down and across the street, had, it turned out, been friends with my sister Carolyn and her husband in Indiana when they were in grad school together in married student housing. Small world. The kids directly across the street, when they got locked out of their house, came over to mine and knew they’d be welcome. I used to walk several brisk miles every morning, waving hi at people on their way to work before I headed back in to take care of my little ones. We all knew each other, at least by face.
But after a few years, people became more settled into their own routines, and that initial openness kind of faded. Until the day: a construction crew with a backhoe accidentally sliced through the major phone cable servicing half the town. Thousands of wires gone. This was going to take awhile. We were all cut off from the outside world for a week unless we got in our cars and drove away.
And you know? The weather was beautiful. People started strolling around the neighborhood, taking in the day. Chatting with their neighbors. Actual face time and in person; it was delightful. A bit scary, on one level, knowing you couldn’t call for help if something happened, but for everyday life, it was wonderful.
And then after a week, the phone service finally came back, people disappeared back into their houses, and that was that. The difference was startling. One couldn’t help but wish for just a little service outage from time to time, just a little.