Making the rounds

AGAIN THIS morning I heard my next-door neighbors speaking in loud voices to each other, more like shouts, and again I wondered if one of them might not have bad ears. I know a lot about their mornings. Today they’re going to make a full pot of coffee to last through the afternoon. That’s why he bought the bigger coffee maker, he reminds her, so she doesn’t have to “repeat.� They probably know my music and maybe my laughter or even the color of the T-shirt I’ve slept in. Our levered windows are flung wide to let in the early light and the still-cool air.

This will be my first summer in my neighborly neighborhood of graceful 1920s duplexes, ailing sycamores, cracked sidewalks, jazzy convertibles, beat-up station wagons, bicycles, baby carriages, lovely, loony waywardness. I’ve lived here through an autumn, a winter and a spring, but now, in summer, I’m paying full attention. I’ve just noticed -- how could I have missed it? -- a fully ornamented Christmas tree in a living room window. What in the world!? How funny, I think, how ... scary, and hope for the best.

Since June, my neighborhood, like so many other L.A. neighborhoods, has begun to reveal itself in ways only summer allows. I’m getting to know it. I’m learning its sounds, its movements. I’m learning its stories in brief encounters and leisurely observations on my daily walks. Warm weather has made available so much more: the protective layers of reserve have been packed away for the season. Everything, including the profligate flora, is less self-conscious. It feels a lot like Paris.

I know about the silky-haired dog named Mary and how she was retrieved by neighbors somewhere down the street from the miserable life of neglect she lived all alone, all the time, in someone else’s backyard. I know these neighbors think the name Mary is goofy for a dog, but that it’s too late to change it. I think it’s just right for her. Every day Mary looks glossier, friskier, more feminine. Now that I know her story, or this much of it, I watch for her. I want to keep up with her progress.

One street over, there’s a terrier whose owners, two gay men, have joint custody of him. Last week he had a baby-sitter -- that’s how the innocent-faced young Latino who tended him referred to himself. In the twilight of a breezy evening, the baby-sitter sat on a stone ledge beside a gaunt white-haired man with a New York accent and a wooden cane, and both of them were genial in the manner of small-towners on a front porch. I’ll bet they would have been fine with my sitting right down with them to watch the terrier, had I been so inclined.

But I wanted to keep strolling my neighborhood, as I do a lot lately with my friend Peter after we’ve eaten our home-cooked dinner at the kitchen table. The noise of family life spills from the open windows and second-floor balconies; cooking smells float out and cross paths with the fragrance of roses, the occasional reek of garbage set out at curbside. We walk slowly. We look closely. We listen. We make know-it-all judgments about what works and what doesn’t, and we entertain ourselves with wicked comments about the worst offenses. Cedars mixed with palms in that tiny front yard, gardenias with birds of paradise? A paint color like guacamole mixed with too much sour cream? Hand me our taste-police citation book.

Let’s pray no one stops in front of my house and cites me for the overgrown natal plum vine obscuring the stucco or the over-bright bulbs in the outdoor light that cause temporary blindness. Let’s not even get into the stacks of unattractiveness in the dusty garage that I regularly forget to close when I drive away in my car, which needs a good wash -- always. And please overlook that download of Donovan’s Greatest Hits, I wasn’t in my right mind. But isn’t my new Bose iPod speaker unbelievably powerful? My downstairs neighbor thinks so.

Surely there are other noticers of small details wandering the shady streets, because so many of us are out here, walking, on these summer nights. In fact, I wouldn’t change a thing about my neighborhood and I hope they wouldn’t either. For all its flaws, it’s as goofy and right and beautiful as Mary’s name.

At all hours of the day, I hear music. From somewhere nearby, a woman sings an a cappella aria-style tune in French (If this is your day job, madam, quit). An African American man passes by belting out a lyric about praying for rain. After sunset on a Saturday night, I hear the rousing blast of a stereo from across the street: another party in the blond starlet’s apartment. Two blocks west, there’s live jazz from a coffeehouse I was only vaguely aware of until this moment. Two blocks east, several voices sing a celebratory song in Yiddish from the upstairs unit of a duplex.

I’ve become inordinately comforted by the streams of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who pass back and forth along the streets in the ancientness of their heavy black garb. No matter that I don’t understand them: They make me feel safe. Maybe it’s the consistency, the dependability, the exacting rituals -- the same bearded elders and women in mid-calf skirts holding the hands of gawky fledglings, so snug. Yes, there they are again, like clockwork. Here I am in my neighborhood.

On foot, we get used to each other’s faces and habits. A familiar old man searches the scruffy strip of green outside his building. A few days ago he lost the medal of a Catholic saint that he has worn around his neck ever since he fought in WWII, and he is trying to be philosophical about it, it’s just a thing, you know. But he misses it. He wishes he had it back. He has also lost his wife of 60 years. She walked out on him just like that a month ago, but he should have predicted it, he says, he’s Italian and she’s German, not an ideal match. But oh, my gosh, what a looker she was. Still is.

My neighborhood is an enlivening panorama of ethnicities, religions, ages, professions, personalities, preferences. We’re intimate strangers, most of us, agreeable when we pass on the street, sometimes stopping for a minute or two -- sometimes saying too much too soon -- but more often than not simply nodding, smiling, moving on. We’re in summer mode, relaxed, willing, curious, making discoveries, feeling included. Our windows and our imaginations are open to the world.

Late afternoon, and The Louds next door are at it again. “I’m sorry, but people who don’t believe in God are nuts,� she shouts, but I can’t make out his reply over the clanging of pots and the abrupt rumble of a truck passing by. Then there’s silence for a second or two before I register a riot of birdsong coming from all directions. I had no idea there were so many birds in my neighborhood. I had no idea there was no place else I’d rather be.

Barbara King can be reached at [email protected].