Living in a culture where face-to-face community sometimes feels as accessible and ready-made as homemade bread, my feelers are up high for where to find it. Having spent the majority of my life in the church, I entered the out-of-church world wondering (wandering), genuinely, how people out here find it. Who brings you casseroles when you have a baby, for example? Who fills in as surrogate family when your own lives miles away? And how do you have meaningful conversation, about politics or spirituality or ethics or the mysteries of quantum physics, for that matter, if the most informal conversation you have in a week happens in line at the grocery store?

The main thing I’ve learned in recent years is there are as many answers to such questions as there are people.

For the last two months I have been going with Elijah to a neighborhood park each morning. We spend about an hour there, eating sand, testing the doneness of bark chips, drying the slides with our butts. What has happened, though, in spite of or because of these things, is community has formed around a little crew of us who gather there each day. There’s the Swedish nanny whose family is mostly scattered across Europe, and who misses them dearly. There’s the Chinese caregiver who is teaching me, laughingly, her language, while I teach her mine. There’s the granddad who is full-time watcher of grandbaby, Ben, and who loves ham radios and biking and Nova. Yvette, who loves to travel, and whose Liam has the best manners of any 20-month-old I know. John, whose Sarah eats only humus and guacamole and who serenades us constantly (Sarah–not John). We talk together, almost daily, in the relaxed, come-and-go way that can only happen in a place that’s built for play.

We like each other. We look forward to being there. In a world of so much anonymity, it feels great to be greeted warmly by name, to have a place, to be missed when illness keeps us away.

Here’s four of the little guys who are forming friendships of their own, at our feet. Elijah is on the far right, next to Sarah, Liam, and Ben. I think he might be receiving some kind of revelation about Sarah’s elbow.

This is one of the ways that I’ve found connection and conversation in a life season and occupation that aren’t particularly people full. But how about you? How have you done it? Any stories of unlikely groups or connections?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Bridge-building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.