What can we expect of a random collection of people who, for financial or social or racial reasons, find themselves sharing the same geographical space? In other words, what are my responsibilities to my neighbor?

The Bible says "love thy neighbor," but that doesn't work out very well if I take it literally. And the Bible says a lot of other mysterious things, like if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out, but what if thy neighbor's eye offend thee? Well, I wouldn't recommend following that particular injunction either.

Neighborhoods are not tribes, either, which are connected by blood and custom and belief and mores (and, at campouts, s'mores.) Neighborhoods are not family, most of the time, but rather odd people whose taste in landscaping and lawn art you may hate.

My family and I happen to live on one of the busiest streets on the Isthmus. My husband and I chose to live here when we were still thinking as single people about to marry. We loved the first house we bought, across the street from the one we live in now, and weren't particularly thinking about raising a child on this street. So, when Alex came along, in November, I began to imagine a picket fence-and come Spring, Ken built one. Now it's hard to imagine that house without one.

Our present house backs up to a sort of quadrant of houses with long and short backyards, so that when neighbors on one side smoke a cigarette and I'm sitting on my deck, I smoke too. Or when people waiting at the bus-stop across the street are laughing loudly, I unwillingly share the joke in the summer when my windows are open. I hear their most personal endearments -or not-- when husbands and wives do yardwork together-and they can't help but hear mine when my husband and I do the same.

Animals are another problem. One neighbor feeds squirrels, which, feeling welcome, nest in our attic whenever they get a chance, chew our Christmas lights to bits, and hog the birdseed. Many people feel free to let their cats roam - "it's natural," one told me. Yeah, when they lived on the savannah-but I've seen at least six cats and a couple of dogs squished on our crazy, busy street. And, of course, cats eat birds, which I feed. And the dog poop problem-well, best not to get me started on that.

On the other hand, there used to be an unseen person high up in an apartment which abuts our backyard who played the most beautiful, mournful sax near sundown. Another used to practice bagpipes in the Presbyterian church lot catty corner from us-again, as the sun set over the distant lake. It was haunting and ethereal-maybe a secret tribute to a lost friend.

But many play boomboxes the size of refrigerators-and the kind of music that takes six seconds to make me want to strangle a stranger. I'm very sound sensitive. I can't stand the jerks who drive what we call "boom cars"-the kind that shake with the vibrations of the deafening music inside-frequently sexist and ugly music. But do they have the right? Maybe. I don't know where the line is.

In some suburbs and many condos, though not any I would care to live in, the neighborhood association or the developers or somebody has the power to restrict whatever they agree on-for example, they can forbid you to string a clothesline and tell you what colors you can paint your own house. Here, I might be in trouble. As one who lives in a house that is painted in a color advertised as "mauve," which is cool, but which turned out to be Pepto-Bismal pink, which is not cool, I feel sensitive about such stuff. And yet, occasionally I sight a house that must have been painted for spite lime green or cerulean blue or, I have heard, painted like a big flag. Then, I feel sorry for the neighbors, for verily I say to you, I begin to feel like plucking out my own eye.

On the other hand, there are wonderful things about randomness in neighbors-ours is a mixed neighborhood with a lot of absentee landowners renting mainly to students and a few on-location owners, like us, trying to rent to older students or young working people. There are also a sadly-decreasing number of lifetime residents, and a few young families.

Two blocks away is a tiny business district, which, when we moved here in 1987 had a whole foods coop, a butcher shop, a liquor store, a plumbing business, a rock shop, a knitting shop, a great regular grocery, a kids' clothing shop, a laundromat, a hair salon and three little restaurants. Now we have the only five or six of the above (I'll let you guess whether the liquor store survives) and we are the poorer for it.

Lots of cute shops have come and gone-somebody's dreams down the spout. We still have some really elegant antique and fabric stores and an art gallery. One store came and went before I ever found it open! (There's a story there somewhere.) Often, the storefronts sit lonely and dusty until another person has a great idea. Just recently somebody did-an art supply house--which is a wonderful idea and one that might just have a niche here.

Ideally (and I don't always meet my own ideals) being neighbors to me means looking out for each other-as our neighbors across the street and we do. If their lights are not on for a couple of days, I call or go over. If they see strange people lurking here, they call. I have watched their grandchildren, who were babies when my son was, but who live in another part of town, grow up and become real people. They have gone to school functions with my son-and fuss endlessly over him. That's the kind of neighborhood I have in mind.

Lots of our tenants have grown up, finished school, gotten married (sometimes to each other) and now, the first has had a baby. People occasionally walk by the 100 year old house we live in and pause. Sometimes, if I see them, I inquire if I can help them. Sometimes they have lived in the neighborhood as children. One lifelong resident on Dayton told me about watching the single lady, Helen Olsen, who lived in our house her whole life, drying her hair by tossing it over her head in the sun amid the lilies in our backyard. I never knew Helen because she passed on about a month after we moved to the neighborhood, but I love that story. Sometimes I feel Helen in my house, though I only saw her alive once, and I like the idea that whole lives were passed and that the woodwork looked about the same (not to mention the plumbing.)

There is one bright spot or two in all this change, too. A few blocks away, the Baldwin street neighborhood has managed to install "traffic calming" islands and speed bumps so that their children are safer in the streets and, given the chance, the kids play outside as long as they can get away with it in the summer-and nobody worries excessively. Some neighbors also have started having family singalongs-where we bring any instrument we have and entertain ourselves as people have for eons. I'm kind of on the periphery of that kind of living and I miss being able to simply saunter over to my neighbor's house for a cup of tea without dodging the screaming traffic, but I compensate. I have in mind a kind of Lucy and Ethel situation, and my favorite sister and I are already planning our dotage in a place where we and our sweethearts can live close to each other, something we haven't been able to do for twenty years, where we can choose, at least in part, our neighbors.

-Gay Davidson-Zielske

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