The Neighbors

My family moved from a tenement apartment on The Boulevard in New Haven to a brand new ranch style house in the suburbs of East Haven, Connecticut during the summer before I started fourth grade.  I would live there until I graduated from college and when someone asks, Where are you from? it’s that house I think of.   Like most kids, I quickly made new friends and more or less forgot about the kids from the apartments.  My parents, too, made new friends in the neighborhood.  But several times a year, when they told us they were going out with The Neighbors, it wasn’t the people from the new neighborhood, it was their old friends from The Boulevard.  This went on until my Mom passed away at 68, and after that my Dad would still reconnect with a few of The Neighbors.  Occasionally we’d get dragged along to reunion picnics where we tried to act like we were still friends with kids we hadn’t seen in years.  I never quite understood their attachment to the old neighbors when they had perfectly good new ones.