She might have cookies

by David Benjamin

“… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
— Robert Frost, Mending Wall

MADISON, Wis. — The East Side of this town is one of its older districts, where wood-frame bungalows went up on small lots to shelter the workingmen and women who built the Capitol, the banks and department stores, government offices, the YWCA and the University. Passing these rows of sturdy, modest homes this week, I noticed one nestled inside a grand patch of trees. The other feature that caught my eye was an aged fence, rusty and unraveled with tipsy posts.

Idly, I began looking for other fences along the way. There were few. The East Side, like other established towns, cites and communities all over Wisconsin, grew up in the era before walls and “privacy” became the fashion.

I started life in a hamlet called Tomah where, if the urge came upon me, I could walk all the way across town through back yards — perhaps a mile, maybe more — without encountering a single fence (but alert to the possibility of an overzealous watchdog). Once in a while, my grandmother, Annie, would sight a boy using her yard as a shortcut to the lake, and she would suddenly decide to stick her head out the window and object to the startled kid’s trespass.

This was an outburst both rare and conditional. If the intruder was one of the Weiner kids, who lived two houses away, or a Kimpton boy from nextdoor, or — for that matter — a Cooper, Konicek, Bursinger, Herdrich, Friedl, Draak or even one of the dread Mullers from down Pearl Street — Annie let them cross her turf unreproved and barely noticed, unless she had fresh cookies to share.

Annie’s occasional reproach was more a case of mood than territoriality. Even if the trespasser was unfamiliar, she was more likely to ignore his transit than to object, unless she had fresh cookies to share.

Archie, my grandfather, could build almost anything, but never a wall. If neighbors had erected a physical border any more substantial than a picket fence — a device purely decorative and easy to talk over — Archie would have scratched his head and wondered what was wrong with those folks. Annie, whose feelings were more combustible, would’ve simply started despising the stuck-up bastards.

My grandparents were in tune with Robert Frost, who saw no sense in mending walls that keep nothing in or out but only serve as monument to an idiotic axiom: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

In one of Marshall Dodge’s “Bert and I” sketches, Bert has a Robert Frost moment. He meets his neighbor at the stone wall — too low and decrepit to hinder dialog — that divides their fields. The neighbor breaks the news that the State of Maine has just re-surveyed his farm and determined that it actually stands on the other side of the border. It’s in New Hampshire. Bert’s neighbor heaves a sigh of relief and says, gratefully, “I don’t think I coulda stood anothah Maine wintah.”

I lived once in California, where nearly every lot features a fence tall enough to seal a body off from ever seeing, meeting or talking over it to Bert, Annie or anyone else. Still, I befriended my right-hand neighbor Randy, as well as his wife, Lesley, his kids and Brutus, the dog. Brutus, a boisterous black Labrador would hear me whenever I set foot in my back yard and commence to bark menacingly. So, in a voice familiar to him, I’d shout, “Shut up, Brutus.”

Brutus would shut up. It was a bad fence but Brutus was a good neighbor.

Randy and I moved into our houses fifty-odd years after the fences had gone up. Neither of us would have thought to surround ourselves with barriers that might preclude the pleasure of conversation. Randy and I foiled our fences by meeting out front after work. He being from Pittsburgh and me from Wisconsin, we were comfortable sitting on my stoop (I had the best stoop on the block) with bottles of beer, watching the joggers go by. We posed a perplexity to many of these passersby. They were unaccustomed to seeing sedentary people, exposed to view in front of a residential dwelling. If Randy and I waved, they they would speed up.

In the fencelands of California, people hunker, hoarding their privacy and speaking in hushed tones behind drawn shades. Every front yard goes untrod, unoccupied, unplayed-upon. Each stoop is virginal. Here and there, harkening to olden times, there are porches. But they are barren, chairless, couchless, swingless.

California’s current crisis, in which an earnest governor is apparently being ousted in favor of a talk-radio psychopath, is a case of bad fences making bad politics. People proscribed by architecture from talking to folks next door seem prone to suffer from fevered grievance and paranoid activism. Take away his fence and a practicing zealot might well forsake his clipboard crusade, opting rather to join his “liberal” neighbor on the stoop to commiserate over stuff more important than who’s the governor. And how can you hate a guy, even a Republican, if you like his dog and he lets your kids play wiffleball in his front yard?

I doubt I would have thought about fences at all if not for six years of mass derangement about building a 650-mile phallic symbol topped with razor wire along a border that 99 percent of us didn’t worry about until a Klan-bred blowhard turned it into the White Man’s last hope to stave off mongrel invasion. In normal times, folks on the East Side, in Tomah, even on my old block in California, are disinclined to erect, re-build, or fortify fences. This is partly because — just like The Former Guy’s cockamamie $20 billion wall — it ain’t worth the outlay.

Here’s the secret. Robert Frost’s “something… that doesn’t love a wall” is us. You and me. America.

Our ex-president grew up behind ivied walls in a gated enclave. All his life, he succeeded — where the rest of us have always failed — to keep himself away from… the others. We mingle where he has merely observed, peering unseen and unsoiled through the smoked glass of his old man’s limousine. Now, he remains cloistered from us in Castle Mar-a-Lago, behind balustrades, moats and drawn shades, shielded by goons and guarded for the rest of his bitter, bombastic life — at our expense — by the stoic minions of the Secret Service. The government he scorns is watching his ass and keeping us — all of us — out of range.

In his gilded hideouts, he embodies a philosophy — of mutual alienation— that he sought to instill forever into the national soul. He bellowed and tweeted us away from one of our favorite, healthiest and most profoundly American pastimes: leaning on a rake and shmoozing over the bridal wreath bushes with the lady next door, who might have cookies.

Will this aberration hold?

I picture snatching him from his solipsist hermitage, spiriting him away — with G-men in desultory pursuit — to Maine, perhaps to Tomah, Pittsburgh, Queens or even California, to any block that has stoops, with beer in the fridge and kids underfoot. Of course, he doesn’t drink beer. He’d look silly perched on the stoop in that stuffed shirt with the codpiece tie. He’d shun the dog. The neighborhood kids would annoy him… and he wouldn’t know what to talk about.

We do. Americans know what to talk about. We’ve been doing it for centuries, on the front steps, out in the yard, around the fire, sitting at the kitchen table. Now that the loudmouth is done drowning us out, we can crack a beer and start up again. We can peek through the knothole. We can lean across the counter. We can flirt with the cashier. We can talk again. We’ve done it before. We’ve always talked.