The World in One Square Mile

Lesson #1: Be the One to Start the Conversation and Start with Where You Are

At the time of this writing, I live in a Victorian home with peeling, white paint and gray trim and a front porch secluded by a row of bushes and three large maple trees on the edge of the sidewalk. Our home on East Main Street is directly across the Second Congregational Church. Our street intersects with a short side road called Hawkins Street that runs straight into A. A. Young Jr. Hose & Ladder Co., the borough’s fire department. The back of the fire department abuts the Jewett City Little League complex, one of the most popular places in town in spring and summer. Jewett City itself is the borough of the town of Griswold, where two of the world’s largest casinos are less than a half-hour drive away, and yet where the town’s biggest attraction is an ice-cream stand at a farm made regionally famous due to its highly photographed sunflower field.

My study is on the second floor, where a cushioned window seat overlooks the street. When it was delivered, the two workers expressed skepticism that it would actually fit. It did, but only after they cut away the floor trim to give an extra inch on either side of the wall. In my literary mind, I have always considered the desk a symbol of how guided spontaneity is sometimes better than waiting until everything measures up.

It’s from this study window that I came across several of the people I would profile. I’d spot someone or a couple of people walking along the sidewalk by my front door or along the sidewalk across the street, and I’d rush outside to meet them and ask if they’d mind if I interviewed them for a short story. Most of them said yes. Sometimes I put my sneakers by the front door instead of the back door where we enter our house to save time. Once I didn't have time to even put on my sneakers. In the middle of the interview with Alisha Martin, her niece, Madison, looked down at my feet and laughed. "You're just in your socks," she said. Alisha has become a friend of the family, so at least I didn't scare them off.

The idea was simple, if not convenient for me. Who are the people who walk by my front door every day? What are their stories? What makes them special? It seems like we either don't think about these questions enough or don't have the courage to actually approach people. But when people begin to talk, their hearts unfold along with their dreams, their hopes, and their sorrows. If only we would ask! I found one of my favorite all-time quotes in a textbook—Writing and Reporting for the Media—I used for a journalism class I taught at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich. “Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee,” said Ben Jonson, English poet and playwright.

One of the people I met for this project posted on Facebook about a word used to describe this feeling in more specific terms—sonder. It’s in the Urban Dictionary, so it's not official, but I still like it. It’s “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.” (Ironic that I later interviewed her as she randomly passed by one day along Main Street!)

I enjoy chatting with strangers from time to time. But I also have to overcome feeling self-conscious and the part of me that just wants to get to where I’m going or be left to my own thoughts. As a teenager at a church overseas I was visiting for a few weeks, the mother in the family where I was staying challenged me one day. “Why do you just stand in the corner?” she asked me of my routine when the service ended. “You need to go out of your way to talk to people.” I was embarrassed by her bluntness. I wanted to make excuses. But she was right, so I pushed myself to interact with others at the church, whether they took the initiative or not. I surprised myself in the process. I really enjoyed getting to know people even if I felt awkward and shy at times.

This project, of course, made it easy to talk to people. It was my excuse. And I’m so grateful for it. It also convinced me of something—we suffer from an epidemic of silence. Sometimes, we silence ourselves. Sometimes, we are silenced by others. But behind the veil of silence is the face of that which makes life beautiful.

The first person I approached outside my home—and just the second story of the series—was a twenty-seven-year-old man who lived in Norwich. From my study window, I saw a stuffed toy cat peeking out of a backpack he was carrying and it stirred my curiosity. It was an October afternoon and small piles of brown leaves had collected along the sidewalk. "This is for my son,” he told me after I introduced myself. We were standing at the corner of East Main Street and Hawkins Street, just yards away from the congregational church. “I want to finally be good enough for him. I want to be strong enough for him. My father left me when I was one year old. He just sold everything in the house and left. I'm going to vow to do better for my children, for my son."