Small Rituals

Reflecting on names, neighbors, and belonging

Feb 13, 2026

One of this year’s Super Bowl ads featured two teenage girls whose parents were moving them to a new neighborhood. The girls’ initial feelings of displacement and loneliness were clear, underscored by Lady Gaga’s powerful performance of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” Everything ends on a happy note, but the ad stayed with me, prompting me to reflect on our neighborhood.

I never imagined myself living in New York City. Whenever I visited on business trips over the years, I was overwhelmed by the congestion, noise, and the feeling of being lost in crowds that seemed to be everywhere. By contrast, life growing up in Chicago and later living in Boston felt manageable. The cities were smaller and felt less complex. I knew my way around.

One of my favorite writers, fly fisherman John Gierach, wrote that he preferred having a river as a neighbor, and that struck a chord with me because I am more of a mountain-and-stream guy at heart. But if I wanted to marry Jennifer, I would have to live in New York City because of her work. At least, we got married in Central Park, surrounded by trees, flowers, and birds.

My wife and I live on the 6^th floor of a co-op in New York City. We’ve been in that apartment for nearly 13 years, but I only know some of my neighbors well enough to talk about the weather in the elevator or laundry room. My next-door neighbor actually calls me “neighbor,” as in “Hello neighbor.” I address him as “Joel.”

I do have one friend in the building. Bob and I go to history lectures and movies, and we also go out for breakfast every other week or so. Ingrid is our server, and she knows our order by heart.

But interestingly, things get a bit richer when I step into the larger neighborhood.

James, our florist, and I greet each other by name. He knows that Jennifer prefers monochromatic arrangements, minimal greens, and the stems cut just so.

Tony runs the pub across the street, and when I walk in to place a takeout order, we call each other by name. He then asks if we want our usual Caesar salads with extra chicken and no croutons on Jennifer’s. He remembers that she’s a Celiac.

Sunny is our dry cleaner. I always ask about her kids and whether she’s taking care of herself, since she runs the business on her own. I give her a bag of oranges every New Year’s. She reciprocates with a strong hug and then hands me a sticky lint wand. We now have at least one in every closet.

Douglas runs the hardware store, and over the years, we’ve carefully said and sighed enough to one another to know that our politics align. I usually have a question about the location of a certain tool or product, and Douglas always walks me to it.

The young woman at our local pharmacy knew my name before I had an opportunity to ask hers, but now I always greet her as Ashley.

The common thread in these relationships is our use of each other’s names, which runs counter to the anonymity I expected of the city. The cynic might say, “Well, the merchants are just being nice because they want your business.” I don’t agree. I think they genuinely see me as somebody—because I see them as somebody—and not just as a customer on the other end of a transaction.

My former colleague, Mike, was the first person to show me the value of calling people by their name. When I rode with him on sales calls, he would always address the person across the conference table by name. Honestly, they were more friends than clients. In a restaurant, he would always notice the server’s name and recognize them, and if their name tag was absent, he would ask their name. Doing so changed everything.

My wife, who also works in sales, stressed the importance of calling someone by their name on the phone. She always introduces herself with her name when making a call and asks for the name of the person she’s talking to. I’ve followed this practice for years, especially during customer service calls. If the person on the other end gives me their name but I don’t catch it, I’ll ask them to repeat it. If the call goes well, I thank them by name. Many seem genuinely surprised. I think it takes a special person to handle customer issues all day.

Jennifer and I are on a first-name basis with the maintenance staff who keep the co-op running efficiently. Yes, we pay a monthly maintenance fee, but the guys are always there when we need immediate help with something out of the ordinary.

Delilah, our mail person, brings small packages up to our door rather than leaving them on the mailroom shelf.

I value my neighborhood connections because they ease the isolation my open-space mindset feels in a large, complex, and sometimes rough city. New Yorkers are quick to lay on their horns at any time of day or night, just a split second after the light turns green. That honk is often followed by a middle finger or a string of profanity if the cars in front don’t move fast enough.

God help you if you’re walking along the sidewalk, admiring shop windows instead of rushing headlong to your destination.

It’s best to avoid trying to make conversation or have eye contact on the subway. A very pregnant rider recently looked at me with suspicion and a sense of threat until she realized I was gesturing to offer her my seat.

So, my neighborhood connections are like a balm, which makes the one holdout even more concerning. I don’t know why, but the checkout clerks at our local grocery store have always seemed more interested in talking with each other, their manager, or just being bored. For fifteen years now, my “Hello, how are you?” at the start of checkout and my “Stay warm” or “Stay cool” at the end have mostly gone unnoticed. I’m no longer surprised that I end up thanking them at the end of the exchange instead of the other way around.

That was standard procedure until recently. I happened to catch the clerk’s eye as she handed me the receipt tape, and when I said, “Have a good day,” she smiled. I swear, a bright light broke through the cloud layer above, accompanied by a chorus hitting a single grateful note, like what the Beach Boys sang at the end of “Good Vibrations” — “AAAAHHHH!”

Her smile reminded me of a scene from Under the Tuscan Sun, where Diane Lane, playing Francis Mayes, watches an elderly gentleman walk up the lane below her balcony every day to change the flowers in a small memorial built into the wall. For months, he’s looked up at her, but when she smiled and waved, he just turned and walked down the lane.

Until one day, he didn’t. He started to walk away, then turned to look at her. He then briefly touched the brim of his cap and eked out the tiniest of smiles, as if to say, “OK, I see you.” Yes, I know it’s a movie, but her reaction of gratitude at finally being seen always brings a smile to my face.

Of the seven families living on our co-op floor, two are Asian, one is South Asian, one is Black, and three are White. It is a microcosm of Forest Hills, the community where we live in the borough of Queens, which is one of the world’s most diverse urban centers.

When I first walked the streets of our neighborhood 15 years ago, it struck me that I heard very little English spoken by passersby. Today, I hardly give those voices a second thought.

That variety is reflected in the independent shops that line our town’s streets: a beauty salon owned by a Russian immigrant, a Greek-owned pharmacy, an Asian-owned nail salon, a Korean-owned dry cleaner (Yes, that’s Sunny.), a Thai takeout storefront owned by immigrants from Thailand, a sandwich shop run by Black Americans, and an Italian restaurant operated by Italians who came with their nonnas’ recipes committed to memory or scribbled on scraps of paper.

These people, and scores like them, are all just hard-working folk trying to make a living, pay their taxes, and raise their families. Honestly, they make life here interesting, especially when you take the time to engage them in conversation.

It’s difficult not to view my neighborhood through the lens of the current administration’s immigration policies and actions, driven by the interesting demographic fact that we are all either members or becoming members of a minority. Whites are expected to become a minority in the United States around 2044–2045. That prospect scares the you-know-what out of many White Americans who see it as a threat to their social, economic, and voting power. They’ve bull-horned or fallen for the false notion that “They’re stealing our jobs!”—jobs they often don’t want anyway.

As a result, they rally around the MAGA hatred of “the other,” detention centers, and deportation quotas—quotas that are less about deporting “illegal immigrants and violent criminals” and more about hyping numbers to energize the red hat crowd and keeping Steven Miller happy. Every recent president has deported illegal immigrants, and I’m not arguing against that practice, but they didn’t do it through confrontations with masked, camo-clad, long-gun-toting thugs.

Science knows something here. From a physics perspective, the color white, as a wavelength of light, doesn’t truly exist; it is a mixture of all visible light wavelengths.

Walking in the Woods

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