Strangers I Have Known

~ A blog by Melissa Kotler Schwartz

Strangers I Have Known

Monthly Archives: March 2014

 30,000 Strangers under the Age of Thirty

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Melissa Kotler Schwartz in Blog Posts

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Austin, Austin Java, Body, Cincinnati, Coffee Shop, Contacts, Crowds, daughter, Directions, Drinking, Dutch, Experience, French, Go Girls, Hangover, Hotel, Lyndon B. Johnson, melissakotlerschwartz, Minute, Mom, Museum, Music, Musician, Not moving to Austin, Ouch, Perform, South by Southwest, Stoned, Stranger, strangers, strangersihaveknown, Suzanne Vega, SXSW, T-Shirt, Texas, Thumping, Traveling, Trip, TX, Young people

I spent last week with 30,000 strangers under the age of thirty. People may be having fewer children in America, and for that matter all over many parts of the world, but when it comes to hearing music and seeing films the young who can pull it off are at the South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. So many languages were spoken—I heard Spanish, Dutch, German and French.

My daughter, a seventeen-year-old musician, attended SXSW because she was selected to play with Go Girls, an independent women’s music venue, at one of the Austin Java coffee shops. Of course, I had to come along. And, of course, her nana  flew in to watch her perform.

Afterwards, the two of us tag-alongs did some serious people watching, which made us feel really old. E-cigarettes everywhere, tattoos galore in some painful parts of the body (just in case you didn’t know, big trend: necklace design tattoos on women, when I look at them, I think “ouch”, my décolletage), and sightings of numerous gauges on men that I just don’t get. Lots of drinking and drugs, of course—this is a music festival. Ambulance sirens blasting every half-hour or so, unnerving my mom and I. Everywhere you go, people talking to friends about their hangovers. Not to mention the hotel shuttle we couldn’t take last night because the driver warned me that someone had just thrown-up in it. My biggest worry: the stoned people that ambled straight across streets, oblivious to traffic coming at them at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour.  If I felt outdated, my mom must have thought she was part of a museum exhibit, but she handled it really well, moving slowly but with intention through the crowds. My favorite sighting was a man in his fifties with a t-shirt that said, “I’m not moving to Austin.” I wanted to get a matching one.

There was no relief from the music, and even in our hotel room you could hear a thumping raucous bass pounding away from early afternoon until the wee hours of the night. I found it so irritating that I’ve never been so grateful to own a pair of headphones, so I could hear myself think. Music is a pleasure, but not at 1 a.m.—and not ALL music.

My daughter, on the other hand, loved every minute and used every second. She sold CD’s, handed out hundreds of business cards, and made some great contacts. She even met Suzanne Vega at a workshop and Suzanne is now following her music.

I’m so happy for her. I’m also glad not to be waiting an hour for a cab anymore, only to find one with a cab driver who has only been in this country for a week and doesn’t know where the Lyndon B. Johnson library is. (Which, by the way, is a phenomenal Presidential Library. Worth the whole trip! By the way, hardly anyone was there.)

To add to my exhaustion, I’m giving out directions to the cabby as we weave through bicycles and pedicabs—you know those bike taxis in which two people get carted around, often by someone who is struggling so hard to breathe you think he will die from a heart attack pumping them up a slight hill.

I was very tired when I returned to Cincinnati; so was my mom when she went back to Florida.  Am I glad I went? Yes. SXSW is not an everyday experience. And now, two days later, I’m just emerging from the overstimulation. Oh, to be that young again…

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Click here to view the photos from the Rolling Stone “48 Best Things We Saw at SXSW 2014.

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The Bad News about Not Knowing Our Neighbors

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by Melissa Kotler Schwartz in Blog Posts

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1950's, A study, Americans, Bad News, Cars, Community, Complaints, Conclusions, Crime, Driveway, Egg, Elderly, Grocery store, Interests, melissakotlerschwartz, Neighborhood, Neighbors, Outside, Relations, Seventies, Shoveling, Smile, Snow, Sociologist, State Farm, Statistics, strangers, strangersihaveknown, Stubborn, Toothpick, Tribune Newspapers, USA, Woman

A study by State Farm Insurance found that only 25% of Americans know the names of their neighbors. That’s a very important fact and not a good one. That same study found that 60% of people have complaints about their neighbors. According to Tribune newspapers in April 2012, “Neighborly relations have declined in the U.S. since the 1950’s, for reasons sociologists don’t quite know, and lack of local ties is bad for crime and a community’s ability to organize for their interests, to say nothing of leaving you stranded when you need one more egg.”

Yesterday, I thought about that study when I took our puppy on a walk and saw an elderly neighbor shoveling her long, sloping driveway. She must have been shoveling for a good hour and half because I had seen her on my way home from the grocery store. Then, she had been at the top of the driveway, now, she was three-quarters of the way down. That’s a lot of shoveling for anyone, I thought, especially for someone in her seventies.

When I saw her the first time, she was by herself, but now, there was a man a good thirty years younger watching her from the shoveled part of the driveway with a toothpick in his mouth. Why aren’t you shoveling? I wanted to ask him. Instead I just said “hi”. He did not say hi back. She did, in a matter-of-fact way, and she went on working.

“I hope you’re not working too hard,” I said, smiling. She gave me a half-smile back.

The man just stood there perfectly still and I had a feeling that he just wanted me to leave.

I walked away with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Something just didn’t seem right. Was what I saw as simple as a stubborn woman who didn’t want the man, whoever he was, to help her? Or was it something I should be concerned about? Or was it neither of those things? I know that there are a lot of people who either live in the house or visit. I often see three to four cars outside. But what does it all mean?

The truth is, both of us fit right into State Farm’s statistics on neighbors. As many years as I’ve seen her, I don’t know her name or anything about her.  She doesn’t know my name or anything about me. And I do have a complaint: Next time it snows I’d like to see that man shoveling the driveway. But maybe he can’t because he has a medical condition. Of course, I’ll never know. I’ll just have to draw my own conclusions.

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Melissa Kotler Schwartz

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