An Evening Stroll

Upon an evening stroll, I come across a scene I’ve witnessed countless times. Men with grizzled faces, each wrinkle its own story, sit on the little stoops in front of their homes on the tiny side streets of Baltimore. The low light from the setting sun reflects off the Formstone facades of their narrow rowhomes, encompassing the neighborhood in a warm golden glow. The men settle down with a beer in hand to listen to the sounds of the Orioles game coming through an open window from the kitchen radio.

The men do not gather together around a single stoop to listen to the game, rather they set up each stoop as if it were his own throne, and the street was a shared living room. The chatter among the men starts with the optimism of an O’s win tonight, but turns, as it always does, into a report of the daily progress of their medical maladies and family woes.

And I finally realize that this nightly summer tradition isn’t really about the O’s. It is a way for men of a fiercely independent age to check in on each other. The warm golden glow I felt from the setting sun turned out to be an illusion. That warmth came from the enduring ties that make a neighborhood more than just a collection of houses on the same street. That warmth came from a sense of community that turned each house into a home and each neighbor into his brother’s keeper.