Cincinnati, Ohio: 2009-2010
The first place I lived in on my own was a low-rise U-shaped courtyard apartment building in Cinncinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood. I was barely there because I was in a sales job where I was on the road all of the time and I was busy experiencing the finest two-star hotels across Ohio and Kentucky - the bartender at the Drury Inn and Suites in Dublin, OH had my drink order1 ready every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday when I would check in - but I remember the name of my neighbor at the Cincinnati apartment, because it was also Tony. It was very difficult for me to make friends in the city because I wasn’t around a lot, and I wasn’t particularly close with Tony or his partner, but I remember two interactions in particular: one was the day I came home and fifteen giant flat packages were waiting for me, each of them probably five feet tall by four feet wide by eight inches deep. These were corrugated displays that I was building as part of my retail sales rep job, and they also blocked the entrance to Other Tony’s apartment. The second is that once I got locked out of my apartment when I locked my keys in my car and needed to knock on Other Tony’s Door so I could poop in his bathroom.
Glendale, California: 2010-2011
The second place I lived in on my own was a big apartment complex that I picked because I had to move across the country in two weeks and had one day to find a place, so I literally picked the building closest to my job. The amenities were nice, the complex had a pool, and I could walk to the mall where Billie Eilish shot that music video2. I don’t think I ever met a single other person who lived in that complex. People had told me that L.A. could make you feel atomized and isolated at times, but I’m really trying to think through it and I don’t even think I shared an elevator with anyone in the year that I lived there. I only used the pool on weekend mornings, nobody else was around then, either. Is it possible that they built the place just for me and tricked me into thinking more people lived there? Is it still there? If I go there now is it just a fenced off field and an old guy saying “nobody’s lived here for fifty years”?
Hollywood, California: 2011-2013
Both the objectively crappiest apartment I’ve ever lived in and my absolute favorite. The place was falling apart: the sink backed up at one point, the bathtub backed up at another, and the building had a roach problem. Once, water poured in from my bathroom fan. Another time, water punched a hole in my first-floor popcorn ceiling and started leaking into my living room, and for some reason the water was red. I had absolutely no cell phone reception and my girlfriend (now wife) had to get me to buzz her in by throwing rocks at my window. But it was rent-controlled, and I moved to that location so I could live around the corner from my improv theater, and eventually I used the place to host my improv team’s practices on Thursday nights. One of my coworkers lived right above me and we were pals and carpooled to work; she once threw a fancy wine-and-cheese party for grown-up people and I got so drunk at it that I had to sleep in my bathroom. The neighbor who lived next to me was a very nice guy who I think sold weed out of his apartment3, and he never once complained about me and my friends having our stupid improv practices on Thursday nights.
Chicago, Illinois (Lincoln Park): 2013-2015
When I moved back to Chicago, I got an apartment in the very yuppie neighborhood of Lincoln Park because it was the easiest way to access multiple train lines and I didn’t own a car, and it was one of few neighborhoods in the city I could name off the top of my head. It’s probably the best neighborhood in the city in terms of “number of Notre Dame Law School grads who go running along Lake Michigan at 5:30am every day”. I lived in an 18-unit building, and the neighborhood was beautiful, but again, I didn’t really run into any of my neighbors, except one Saturday at 3am when one of them was drunk and went to my door instead of hers by mistake so she spent 30 minutes slamming her body against the door trying to get in and I was absolutely terrified and convinced somebody was trying to kill me (I was half-asleep) so I called the cops.
Chicago, Illinois (Hyde Park): 2015-2018
This was the first place I lived in with my wife. One of my coworkers, somebody that I worked with regularly, actually lived in the same building as us, which I didn’t realize until about two years in, when we took the same bus home, and then got off the bus at the same place, and then went into the same building. Perhaps this gives you a good idea of how outgoing I am as a neighbor.
Chicago, Illinois (Current): 2018-Present
As I’ve stated earlier, most of my time with my neighbors is spent figuring out what to do about the damn sewer system.
In all cases, I am a better neighbor than the Slater family in 1946 medalist Strawberry Girl.
Strawberry Girl is one of writer/illustrator Lois Lenski’s “regional stories”, a genre which apparently did exist, was very popular from Reconstruction through the first half of the twentieth century, and in which Lenski produced many works, although Strawberry Girl is easily the most famous. “Regional literature” of this era worked like this: you basically went to some backwoods or rural or otherwise not-widely-known area of the United States and built the setting of your novel around extremely local and authentic dialect and idioms and history. Mark Twain could be considered an exemplar of regional writing, especially given his command of multiple Missouri dialects. Kate Chopin and John Kennedy Toole did the same thing for New Orleans, Flannery O’Connor did it for Georgia, Faulkner did it for Mississippi, and Garrison Keillor might still be doing it for Minnesota today if he could have just not sexually harrassed his employees so much. Strawberry Girl was explicitly marketed this way; as the jacket copy put it:
“This is a story full of enterprise and fun and the excitement of real life in this interesting part of America. Lois Lenski has used again her gift for catching the flavor and drama of life in a remote corner of America. It is the second of a series of regional stories through which she promises to introduce other fascinating and little-known backgrounds to boys and girls. This story will take a place beside her popular Louisiana story Bayou Suzette in the affection of readers.”
This trend in American literature became popular soon after the end of the Civil War, when we were trying to be a unified country again and, perhaps, there was some value in gaining a better appreciation for the different local flavors all across our country, for reminding ourselves that the world was bigger than we thought but we weren't alone in it. Today, we're not fighting a Civil War, but we're obviously polarized in many other ways, and perhaps there is value in re-learning this lesson. For example, Strawberry Girl is set in Florida, and it's probably worth taking some time to understand that not everyone from Florida is an anti-intellectual backwoods inbred hick who would burn down my house, or a randomly selected grammar school, I out of resentment. Unfortunately, that is a very thorough description of the main antagonists in the novel.
Strawberry Girl is, ultimately, about a conflict between neighbors, and not the kind of conflict where you disagree about the best way to fix the sewer issue. The Boyer family moves to a strawberry farm and find themselves the neighbors of the uneducated and violently vindictive Slater family. After visiting the Boyers in the first chapter, the Slaters immediately lash out with resentment at their relatively well-off new neighbors, and after seeing that this new family has a tablecloth and patterned dinner plates, snap “Don’t bother to show me no more of them fancy things. Guess we’ve seen enough of your fine fixin’s. Guess we know now how biggety you folks is, without seeing nothing more.” The resentment does come out of nowhere - the Boyers try to be nothing but welcoming - but is clearly fueled by class resentment. The Slaters are poor, they’re uneducated, they try to farm hogs but aren’t very successful at it. And these guys who moved in next door seem to have everything going right for them.
This leads to a series of escalations. The Slaters let their hogs trample all over the Boyers’ strawberry patch. The Boyers clip the hogs’ ears. The eldest Slater kids beat up the schoolteacher for no reason. The Boyers buy barbed wire fencing. The Slaters cut the fencing and also poison the Boyers’ mule. The Boyer patriarch kills one of the Slaters’ hogs and beats the crap out of one of the Slater boys who mouths off to him. The Slaters start a brushfire with the intention of burning down the Boyers’ house and the nearby schoolhouse. So, yes, there are some charming local customs that you’re introduced to, like one-room schooling and buying overalls and grinding sugar cane, but it sure seems like a lot more of this novel is the very dark feud between two families that drags their children into danger as well; the brushfire ends up being the climactic scene because protagonist Birdie Boyer has to go in and rescue two Slater children that almost end up becoming collateral losses.
I’m not a good neighbor; mostly I just keep to myself and don’t like to be bothered. But I’ve never poisoned one of my neighbors’ pack animals before, or really ever been tempted to, in part because none of them have owned pack animals. I’ve never looked over at a neighbor who had it better than me and thought “they have an easy life and I don’t, I better burn their house down”. Lenski wanted to introduce her child readers to some local flavor: dialect and clothing and songs and meetings at the church, but it was apparently also important to her to introduce child readers to another element of local flavor: seething hatred of one’s fellow man. Another recurring motif in the novel is the Boyer family’s continued work fencing off their land with this newfangled barbed wire, needling the reader with some questions about how close they might actually want to be with their neighbors anyways, and how much they might actually want a good fence from time to time. This is not just a fun window into a new part of the country to remind us “deep down, we’re really all the same, let’s move past that Civil War”, this is closer to “hey remember that Civil War? Yeah, we’re definitely capable of killing each other.”
There’s redemption by the end of the novel, to be sure: the two families do eventually reconcile, nobody actually dies in the fire, and Robert E. Lee “Shoestring” Slater is encouraged by Bonnie Boyer to get himself together and start showing up to school actually intent on learning things. But a children’s book from the forties with a smiling girl and the name of a fruit on the cover can, as it turns out, hold a lot of darkness inside of it.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2019 medalist, Mercí Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina.
Whisky sour, I was in a real shitty place.
I mean, she hadn’t shot it by the time I lived there, but I could still, like, buy a big pretzel.
Believe it or not, recreational weed was not legal when I lived in California.