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mary lou sanelli
A View Of The Entire World by Mary Lou Sanelli As of tomorrow, I've lived in Belltown for five years. Hardly agelong. Yet, to my neighbors, or, rather, the people I recognize in the elevator, I'm considered a long-timer. That's because they and I live the recent history of Belltown, dwelling in condos that have sprung up between Fifth and Elliot (east and west), and Denny and Stewart (north and south),  where Seattle tries to invent, from a gritty grid of sidewalks, an "urban community" with all the pluses and minuses those two words call to mind.
Yet, the word "community" implies something else, something more in keeping with the word neighborhood. But that's not how living here feels. Maybe in another twenty, thirty years, I don't know; but community comes slowly, incrementally, no where near as fast as the construction preceding it. Too many of us are new to Belltown for our streets to feel affable, new as the buildings we live in.
More of us are giving the inner city a try because we want for what a little anonymity if, say, we began to feel confined by small-town or suburban tedium, where the familiarity of a perceivably safer life can grow to be annoying, just the way none can. My own story is that one day I woke to realize my yard and garden was flourishing beyond my grandest expectation. But I was not.
Still, there are days when the anonymity I longed for can feel more as if I'm a figment floating over the sidewalks. And as I go about the hard work of sinking layers of new roots, which is difficult from five floors up, I've had moments of almost debilitating longing for my old ones. Days when I'm stuck between change, which I wanted, and transformation, which takes longer. I suppose, on some level, I'm Belltown personified, trying to define myself in the midst of my own renewal.
Not only is there the emotional wrestle of starting over, but it's challenging to build new friendships in a city flush as this one where so many of us own what we need, a luxurious reality, yes. But isolating, too.
Yet, I'm hardly alone. A lot of us are searching for friends, trying to get to know someone over coffee at Uptown Espresso. And, gratefully, it's not the kind of city where everyone is a longstanding resident, where your family needs to go back a generation or no one will talk to you. There are many who want to talk to you-not everyone is texting, too hip for verbs and sentences.
Especially the immigrants, more and more of them everyday, living and working in our neighborhood and lonely beyond what I'll ever experience. They are eager to assimilate, looking for someone willing to guide them, accept them, help them test their communicativeness in a language most difficult to master. Finding them is a huge gap I needed to fill, as I, too, am first generation in this country, never fully rooted or at home as I'd like to feel. Together, we try, best we can, to build what it is the word community really means.
There's Bali from Pakistan. He runs a private post office on Third Avenue. I hold on to my outgoing mail, unwilling to drop it in my lobby's mailbox, just so I can mail it from his store where part of his determination is to make his customers laugh, a quality I find irresistible in another. And rare in Seattle.
And Amagit, pronounced A mah geet, from India. She talks appreciatively about the freedoms women have in this country, which keeps me from taking them for granted.
And Roya, from Iraq, makes the tastiest kubbah at her restaurant. Yet, mouth-watering as the food is, it's not what draws me to her cafe. It's her openness about what it's like to find herself living in this country. How grateful she is to be here in this new, accepting city, alive and unafraid. I adore when her grandchildren visit the restaurant, their high-spirited laughter a relief from the other high-pitched sounds we cope with constantly: the insistent beep, beep, beep of a backhoe in reverse, the damn leaf-blowers, or someone in the alley whistling up to the third-floor drug store window at 3 a.m.
And by drug store, I don't mean Walgreens or Rite Aid, as my friend who lives on the other side of Denny thought I meant. Her home is on Queen Anne (Upper Queen Anne, a distinction she'll quickly specify), a neighborhood as upscale as its name and only a fifteen-minute walk from my door, yet worlds, no galaxies, apart.
She and I don't live in the same Seattle.
Like many of my friends who live in Seattle's tree-lined neighborhoods, she seldom if ever walks the streets of downtown-and I don't mean Westlake Center to shop-so she is unaware of how many homeless sleep in our doorways, addicts pace our sidewalks, or schizophrenics sit on the curb talking to, say, a fire hydrant.
Sad to me is how some of my newfound friends have already moved on, one to Ravenna, another to Green Lake, re-choosing, after a year or two, the privacy and quiet of a house, wanting their neighborhood to have more going for it than proximity.
Another friend from Texas moved on last week. All the way to Ballard. He was always saying how, in Texas, one's social life is a revolving door of social exchange. He found Belltown vacant, unfriendly. Yet, here's the thing: When we first met, he dismissed me as too old. Middle-aged me in his twenty-something world. It took a great deal of effort on my part to get him to open up. No wonder it was hard for him to hang on.
So, as I see it, we have all the troubles and conflicts of Anywhere, America right here in our little microcosm: street crime that makes the headlines (which is where most of us hear about it, too), millionaires, a heartbreaking homeless dilemma, immigrants, party-hardy students, and ageism. All of us bringing our past lives into the present, which can cause us to fail to experience each other beyond our biases. Just like the burbs.
These days I like to think I have a view of the entire world. To look out my window is to see everywhere.
And nowhere. Because, actually, I can't see past the alley.
Originally published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Join Sanelli at her book launch reading and champagne reception to celebrate her newest title, Small Talk, at the University Book Store on June 12, 7 p.m.
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