The Recession on My Street

By Rebecca Powell, 3-12-09

	Caption: The boy at play

The recession is global, impacting institutions and systems bigger than the family, the individual. Yet it is on my tiny street where I see its reality, where I can translate the headlines into the lives of my neighbors.

Our street is an odd street. We are a mix of full and part-time college students, supporting families by cobbling together part-time jobs, grants, student loans and scholarships. Our lives are arranged in sixteen week increments with hopeful beginnings and frantic endings. We live in identical cement brick houses, painted in pastels. Our children think front yards are communal property, while they respect the gardens of the backyards. We can hear each other’s marital fights, laughter, and cries. We can smell the curry of our East Indian neighbor’s dinner and hear the sizzle of the grill in J.’s backyard. We live close. We live well.

Still, the tremors of the recession ripple through the street. For three months, Y. has been waking up the entire neighborhood at 6 AM with the projects of a restless man. Somedays he is hammering, others sawing. We are never sure what he is making. It is his way of keeping busy while he waits for a job, any job. We wait with him. Hoping one day, we hear the noisy truck start, instead of the constant tinkering.

M. watches the children on our street for mothers attending and teaching classes. She watches fewer these days. More and more fathers are available for childcare, as part-time construction jobs dry up. M. asks very little money to watch our children play in her yard, but it is money she uses to buy the extras while her husband finishes his degree. There are less extras now.

We shudder when we think of our classmates who are graduating into this job market. Job searches take on the qualities of myths. There is the fabled guy who sent out a 100 resumes with no response and the MBA student from China who landed a job at Bank of America, only to have the offer rescinded. We say things like, “It’ll get better” and “can’t get much worse.” Although, we think it can.

Mostly, you notice the worry, the uncertainty. We do little things to take precautions—pay ahead on rent, expand the size of our gardens, buy extra non-perishables.  A neighbor and I laugh at our suspicions, our worries, but still pick up an extra bag of rice, some canned milk. And maybe, we think a little smaller, focusing on cobbling enough resources together for just one more semester, one more class.

Yet, for all this, life mostly continues with its usual mix of good and bad. Babies are expected all around us. Two neighbors expect baby girls within the month. I have not told them of my plans to ogle and coo at the new arrivals. Our gardens sprout. Classes pour on papers and work. Wall Street falls and deaths mount in Juarez, but right here, on our street, we live.