Front Porch Week in America

Front Porch Week in America
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — The history of Rockford College — which stubbornly persists in treating me as an alumnus despite my departure after only three semesters — has no record of a campus group, in the late 1960s, called the Chapultepec Social Club (CSC).

Although the school’s administrators at the time ironically acknowledged our presence, we were not a recognized student organization like Circle K, the Young Republicans or the basketball team. There were only five of us — Jody and me, Mackie, Stephen and Dagnes. We elected no officers. We held no actual meetings, except for occasional screenings of movies borrowed from the Rockford Public Library. Our women’s auxiliary was even more informal — so much so that many of its members didn’t even know they belonged.

The CSC represented a minuscule rump of self-described “freaks” among the school’s small and largely conservative student body. Dagnes, a Vietnam veteran whom we shunned for his first month on campus because we thought he was a “narc,” introduced the CSC to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and to “Music from Big Pink.” In turn, I brought to campus its very first copy of “Beggar’s Banquet,” which Jody dutifully broadcast, at roughly 250 decibels, from two windows on the second floor of Dorm A. Blowing out, of course, every fuse in the building.

The CSC, in an inadvertent act of community outreach, discovered the bicycles stored in the basement of the Women’s Living Center. Our subsequent daily outings triggered the college’s brief fashion for bicycle riding. This petered out after the other kids broke all the bikes.

Our proudest moment was a day in late April 1968, during the height of the annual ground-squirrel mating season. For some reason, perhaps inspired by the riot of amorous rodents cavorting on the green, D.P. Dagnes dragged a chair over to the portal of one of the girls’ dormitories, sat down, crossed his lanky legs, lit a Camel and declared that balmy evening to be Bronx Night at Rockford.

Since three CSC members hailed from the greater New York area, where stoop-sitting is a ritual virtually sacred among natives from Arthur Avenue to Breezy Point, this proclamation was understood. Here was a moment for the Chapultepec Social Club to settle down on our haunches, take off our sandals and get social. Like the tenement dwellers of Corona and boulevardiers of SoHo, we celebrated a warm might in springtime by escaping our dark interiors to gather on the stoop, pass the time of night, greet passersby, and exchange amongst ourselves the news of the hour and the word on the street.

This worked remarkably. The first few girls arriving from their evening meal or a visit to the library hurried past us suspiciously. But then Betsy, who lived in the dorm, spotted us. She came out, brought her knitting, hugged us all and accepted when Dagnes offered his chair. The stoop group grew almost bacterially after that. Young men on route to their dorms detoured toward us. Girls from distant dorms gravitated. The school had precious few black students but several drifted in our direction, including Gary, universally regarded as Most Likely to Join the Panthers and Grease a Cop. Charmed by a scene reminiscent of a brownstone staircase in Harlem, Gary mellowed to the point where, for one strange moment, he might have been taken for Scatman Crothers.

Beer was found. And a bottle of Mateus. Marijuana might have been smoked. Jody slipped over to Caster Hall, turned around a couple of speakers and bathed us in the soothing strains of “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” “Alice’s Restaurant,” Vanilla Fudge and Country Joe. By and by, even a few prim and proper members of the Future Republican Housewives of America plopped down onto the grass, spread their skirts and passed the bottle. We talked about Viet Nam and the murder of Dr. King, but also about movies, baseball, who was dating whom and — thanks to Mackie and very briefly — Ludwig Wittgenstein. The gentle hum of our conversation lingered well into the night. Our dispersion was gradual and reluctant.

It was Bronx Night that inspired, 37 years later, a speech I was summoned to give at the sesquicentennial of my hometown, Tomah. As I cast about for a topic, I saw a nation— in 2005 — fiercely divided, quick to anger, seething with distrust and torn by tribalism (not much different from 1968!). I didn’t want to talk about any of that stuff. Instead, I somehow remembered that spontaneous, ecumenical, apolitical, hippy-dippy front-porch hootenanny one long-past spring evening in college.

And so, in my speech, I proposed for Tomah and for every town and neighborhood, the initiation of Front Porch Week in America — an annual event that would resemble, in a spirit of healing our divisions and finding common ground — Bronx Night in 1968 at Rockford College.

It’s simple. For six days on a week after Labor Day when we’re all back from Yellowstone and Bermuda, America’s households — small town and big city, rent or own, condo or bungalow — would tumble outside, en masse, and socialize. On alternating days determined by the odds and evens of street numbers, half the folks in the neighborhood would set up on the stoop, or front lawn, front porch or driveway with refreshments, barbecue grills, beer coolers, folding chairs, umbrellas, dogs, kids, frisbees, kickball, cornhole, whatever. And we’d welcome the other half of the neighborhood, who are strolling and gawking, waving hi and dropping in. Next night, the other side of the street would set up shop and the previous evening’s hosts would go looking for the friends they made the night before. Sitting on the grass, popping a beer, petting the dog, yelling at the kids, waving at mosquitoes, talking… and getting along.

Six days, three times each — and then, maybe, on Sunday, block parties everywhere.

Front Porch week in America, in my wildest imagination, would serve to suggest that maybe Trump believers, when you get to know them, aren’t all benighted bigots and that liberals, perhaps, are not the spawns of the Antichrist depicted on Fox News. Black people might talk to white people, and white people might talk to brown people. Some of us might recall that we all started out in this country — except for the Sioux and the Apaches — as teeming masses yearning to breathe free.

We might notice that, as masses teem, in the neighborhood, on the stoop or on the sidewalk, amongst one another, face to face, holding a beer, sipping a Coke, eating a burger or dipping a carrot into a bowl of garbanzo paste, we talk. We watch our manners. We learn, we teach and we sometimes bond. We discuss, again, how different we are and yet the same. We almost always discover that this person, our neighbor, despite a possibly unfortunate political outlook, is not the harbinger of Apocalypse.

As you might guess, Tomah shrugged off my proposal. There was never a Front Porch Week there, nor will there ever be. Nor in America. Ever. We’re too much in the habit now of holing up, hiding out from Others, and listening only — with a thrill of righteous foreboding — to the Voice of our particular and personal Doom.