My neighbor Mrs. Melman died on Sunday. My neighbor Mr. Melman died on Tuesday. Mrs. Melman was just a hair short of 90 and Mr. Melman was in his 80s. While I was reading the flyers on the bulletin board next to the mailboxes announcing where the services would be held, the super came over and asked me what the story was. I could only think of E.M. Foerster, "The King died and then the Queen died is a story. The King died and the Queen died of grief is a plot."

“There was an ambulance in front of the building yesterday morning,” I said to the super.

"Oh no, that was the lady in 2W."

"Who?" I asked.

"Old Greek lady with white hair."

Which could describe half the women in the building, on the block, in the borough.

Which, additionally, meant three neighbors dead in the space of four days.

“All the old people in the building are dying,” I said to yet another neighbor, my friend Michael.

“That means we’re the old people now!” he replied cheerfully.

I have certainly let slip away the callousness of youth. The sight of the ambulance in front of the building used to send me to the phone to call one of the board members, “What unit?” in case one of my friends wanted to buy in. Now I ask, “What happened?” And so I found myself attending the building’s holiday party yesterday, an event I historically treated as a drive-by encounter, navigating through the old ladies and pausing only long enough to bestow holiday tips on the super and the porter.

I sat next to Michael, sipping bad red wine from a plastic cup, discussing with the neighbors (three of whom were named Rose, so that made it easy) the sweet tragedy of the Melmans (“he always said he would go when she did”), other impending tragedies (“Juan is in the hospital”), how nice the landscaping was and who was on the gardening committee (I am on no committee) and how superior our building was to all the other buildings in the neighborhood. As the party wound up, Michael, another friend and I were able to bound back up the stairs with relative vitality, but the vitality was only relative; we were only young compared to the old. We had not been engaging in the kind of cutting-edge patois that post-graduates thrive on, and I had been effectively snubbed by the wife of the hipster couple who work in graphic arts and ride a Vespa, while happily welcomed into the fold by the three Roses.

Strangely enough, this did not make me feel melancholy. Rather, it made me feel neighborly.

posted by Elizabeth at 6:41 PM