They gathered—my parents and our neighbors. On hot summer evenings, the neighbors would walk over and chat with my mother and father while they all relaxed on the open porch. As a small child, I sat on a step and listened to them sharing bits and pieces of lives. They joked a lot and told stories.

In the winter, they still stopped by. We moved inside to the living room. Our house, built just before the Great Depression of the thirties, had no “den,” just a small living room. Again, my parents and the neighbors crowded around a small coffee table and shared and laughed a lot. I don’t recall any kind of formal organization. Neighbors simply stopped by.

I don’t claim a particular righteousness for that time. After all, our society knew plenty of ills, like racism. Nevertheless, we’ve lost things, too, like that simple neighborhood sharing.

New inventions worked to change us from those earlier times, and some of them gave us new insights. We relaxed before the television and watched different kinds of shows. We learned more about other countries, including wars in far off places. For the first time, we watched political conventions choose candidates for public office.

Eventually we bought portable phones that allowed us access from anywhere to home and friends. We could use the phones to ask for help when we needed it. They also allowed us to connect with friends, even when on public transport or when driving in our cars. People began to carry them everywhere all the time, sometimes constantly consulting them.

Despite the sometimes goodness of those older days of my childhood, though, I wouldn’t want a return to them. I don’t deny that we could profit from more face to face sharing, and from more putting down of our cell phones, and from more reading of newspapers. However, we’ve also profited from the changes. We’ve discovered cures for diseases, built safer airplanes and highways, and enjoyed more accurate weather forecasting. We are more aware of society’s failures that we need to address.

What we lack are the old neighborhoods. We would profit from better arrangements of our housing to encourage a return to neighborhood sharing. What could that involve? Perhaps housing clusters rather than large suburban plots–neighborhoods that we can walk through and where we greet our neighbors.

Especially after the isolation of Covid, we might consider lessons from the neighborliness I knew as a child.