One of my favorite pieces of classical music, however cliché, is Beethoven's Ode to Joy. The reason is that it is indelibly imprinted in my brain in connection to a moving film about the fall of the Berlin Wall that I saw at the "Museum at Checkpoint Charlie" in 1992 (and again in '96 or '97).
But this post is on a different topic altogether... today, some dear friends and neighbors are moving away to another state. As they leave, we find ourselves listing all the reasons we are sad to see them go. To be sure, my school-aged daughters will miss their playmates (the new owners have no children) and we will miss the easy and casual conversations in the fence-less backyard. The list of specifics could go on, but it can all be summarized by the neighborly ideal they represented.
It is not about being inseparable best of friends. We have our circle of friends and they have theirs. Rather, it is about being a welcome part of each other's everyday lives - so common and regular that your lives become intertwined in a way that is hard to catalog. In today's world, there are no guarantees that neighbors will achieve this ideal in their relationship. In fact, most conversations are peppered with the extreme opposite - long-soured neighborly relationships in which those daily interactions are despised and avoided.
We will miss them for some time. In more ways that one, some joy has been taken away from our lives.
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