Recently I received a very nice email from Joshua Weresch. It was one of the more pleasant elements of congruence, serendipity and synchronicity I've experienced of late.
We got together last week before a meeting of the Central Neighbourhood Association, had a long conversation over coffee. After which Joshua stuck around for the meeting, even though he doesn't live in the Central area. Or Ward 2, for that matter. Or even in Hamilton; he lives on The Mountain. (I'm allowed this age-old joke.)
Charmed by his enthusiasm, I asked him if he wanted to write a guest piece for Town Halls Hamilton. Here then, is Joshua's article.
Adrian asked me to write about my incipient community engagement journey. So, as I've found stories of engagement to be encouraging to me, I hope you find this tale to be worth its reading, a reminder that engagement is not a journey to be walked alone.
I'm a life-long Hamiltonian. I grew up on the west Mountain, on the corner of Upper Paradise Road and Scenic Drive, next door to the former Beckers convenience store. Growing up, our neighbours were folks we saw out and about occasionally: next door, a Lithuanian family; across the street, a Dutch family; and a few houses down, school-teachers of my brother and me. It was a quiet neighbourhood, punctuated now and again, by the screams of children in swimming-pools and the rattle of lawn-mowers starting up, and fiercely sub-urban. There were in me, few civic or political noises to make: I sometimes voted, sometimes didn't, but, especially in local politics, when I did, it was a thoughtless process at best.
How did I get- Better, how am I getting, because I'm certainly not there just yet, from 'thoughtless' to 'thoughtful', from an inconsiderate life to a considerate one? Where is this drive for civic engagement coming from?
I think that it began a few years ago with a couple of incidents and has continued to press on me since then. Two or three years ago, my wife and I moved into the neighbourhood of Centremount. I put out the garbage one night, and with it, a couple of cases of empties. The next morning, I saw an old, bearded man on a bicycle, with blue recycling bags balanced on the handles, going from bin to bin and taking out the empties for the ten-cent refund from The Beer Store. I thought to myself, “What the heck is he doing in the suburbs?” That was the first incident, a pricking of conscience, uneasiness.
The second incident came when my wife and I saw older men and women, who used to visit at Mountain Plaza Mall, try to get across Fennell Avenue with their walkers and bags as traffic dodged and weaved around them. My wife said to me, “Why isn't there a cross-walk for pedestrians there? They're going to get killed.” Poverty in the suburbs and the difficulties of older people started up the rattling motor.
Now I have a daughter almost one year old and I wonder what kind of world she'll inherit. I wonder what kind of world any of our family will have. Will it even be 'kind'? Is it going to be a world where people don't care or know about one another? Is it going to be a world that requires of her courage to get outside, know, and help another person, to have meaningful relationships? At the ripe age of thirty years, I'm beginning to see the importance of relationships in the place in which we live. If we're going to live here, if we're going to call this place home, work and play with my daughter and family in this city, then why shouldn't I want to make this place the best that I can?
Now I'm taking steps toward getting a neighbourhood association together for Centremount. It'll mean knocking on plenty of doors, as there are, according to Statistics Canada, 1,730 private dwellings in the neighbourhood and a minimum of 3,883 people to meet. The Ward 7 neighbourhoods of Eleanor, Eastmount, and Allison Park already have community councils and other neighbourhoods in this ward have had councils that have come and gone, too. I think it's a good start: instead of complaining about the neighbourhood, it'd be good, I think, to have a place, a bunch of good people, to bring those complaints to; also, it'd be good to be able to talk and get to know one another, just so we don't feel so isolated from one another. We'll have a way of making changes in our neighbourhood, so people can safely cross a street, so all ages are cared for and respected, not reduced.
The distance between fear and love is, I think, the distance from my front porch to an old man –whose name I don't even know –who's collecting empties from my recycling bin.
