During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people hunkered down, barricaded themselves indoors, and developed a new suspicion of their neighbors.
Mary Lea Carroll, a native Angelena and inveterate pilgrim sidelined by travel restrictions, seized the opportunity to reflect upon the riches of community, to reconnect with next-door friends from long ago, and to foster a new spirit of warmth and fun in the Pasadena neighborhood in which she’s lived for 37 years.
“Across the Street Around the Corner … A Road Home” (Clyde Custom Publishing, $21.95) is the result.
Mary Lea went to school and is a life-long parishioner at St. Elizabeth’s in Altadena.
Out of any ten people, she quips, you’ll get one extrovert and nine introverts who are grateful. (She’s obviously the extrovert).
Though she doesn’t want this to be a “pandemic book,” she happened during lockdown to distribute a questionnaire to the people on her block: “What is a really funny incident you remember that involved a neighbor?” for example, or “Do you remember a time when a neighbor did something really kind for you, or vice versa?”
She only received a few back, but the effort got the ball rolling.
The fifth of nine children, she grew up on Santa Rosa Avenue, a mile-long street with “eighty-foot deodars marching up and down both sides” better known as Christmas Tree Lane. Her maternal grandmother Ruthie, a chain-smoking former silent film star, drove her Corvair to the Santa Anita racetrack each afternoon.
Under their loving but mostly laissez-faire parents, the kids cut through each other’s backyards, built forts, soaked each other with garden hoses, and bought candy and ice cream at the local Thrifty’s.
They had everything they needed: access to a swimming pool, a pet store for hamster supplies, and a street lined by three-feet deep river-rock gutters spanned by little cement bridges in which to create tunnels (and into which Ruthie routinely ran her Corvair).
Mary Lea was 11 when she and her brother Kevin, 10, stumbled onto the 5-acre down-at-the-heels estate of their neighbor Mrs. McKay. Traces of stately boxwood hedges remained, but sheep grazed in the avocado grove and ponies (they’d been rescued from a zoo) roamed the rose garden. In fact, Mary Lea’s first job entailed helping to bury a pony who had died.
Mrs. McKay “seemed ancient” but was only 62, had two obsessions–world hunger and world peace—and perhaps bordered on what today we would call an animal hoarder.
For the next four years, Mary Lea became one of the “dedicated workers”—feeding piglets, mucking out stalls, shoring up the ramshackle fences. After the chores were done, Mrs. McKay would invite everyone in and treat them to a bowl of soup from the pot that perpetually simmered on the stove.
She’d slip in words of wisdom—“Isn’t it wonderful that God’s made your hands washable?” and fancy vocabulary words—“Don’t ever malign anyone, kids.”
It’s hard to imagine a Mrs. McKay in today’s upscale Altadena but she was one of the treasures of Mary Lea’s childhood.
“When my own kids were small,” Mary Lea says, “they got lots of messages about ‘stranger danger.’ A certain amount of caution is fine but could we have gone too far?”
As her friend Brenda observes: “Making where you live a place of value never just happens. You’ve got to be deliberate; make a conscious decision that yes, I will contribute to the spirit of this place, involve myself.”
Being an introvert doesn’t let you off the hook. A simple hello, a wave, an offer to help hang the pot of geraniums can make all the difference. So can a home-made pie for the new family on the block, or the quietly-tended pocket garden that lends a splash of color and beauty to the street.
Mary Lea writes of the elderly lady who hosted the occasional wine-and-cheese party in her driveway. The empty nesters who took in someone else’s recent college grad daughter who hadn’t yet found a job. The basket of protein bars, chips, and nuts with a “For Free!” sign she herself took to leaving on the porch for the mailman, yard workers, and just-passing-through kids.
One neighborhood couple works up a super-duper Halloween display each October–then segues the same elements into a Christmas extravaganza. The annual fourth of July celebration, now with banks of grills, raffle tickets and a parade, started out decades ago when Mary Lea’s kids were three, seven, and nine and she wrote a simple skit about Paul Revere for them to perform.
With three-grown daughters of her own now (and two grandchildren, with another on the way), says Mary Lea, “I want to be a lover of life, not a critic of life. I want to write things that will help. Hopefully, after people read my book, they’ll now look at the person across the street raking leaves and maybe want to say hi.”
Carroll is also the author of “Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints,” and “Somehow Saints: More Travels in Search of the Saintly.”
“Across the Street Around the Corner” is available at all major booksellers. For more, visit maryleacarroll.com.
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