Thanks you Danielle:

You are absolutely correct about people phoning others and looking in on others. Especially when family members do not do this.

It's very important to at least have some knowledge of your neighbors (I mean if that's possible). I'm probably the only person on these boards, that if I walk around the corner,..before I get to Dunkin Donuts, I will probably be approached by 30 people saying" "Hi mel, what's up?"

I went for breakfast with Alan one morning and we are talking just around the corner. At the end of that corner is Dunkin Donuts. Before we get to Dunkin Dounuts, we have to walk up a long block. Must be 25 houses on each side of the street. And some are multi-dwelling houses. So we are talking lots of people.

I will never forget the day that everyone was outside (was a beautiful spring day). And people were walking their dogs. All these dogs ran up to me and started barking at Alan. He looked clueless. And then the people were going "Hi Mel, what's up, how are you". I knew absolutely every one of these people and Alan (because he is a very conservative, shy kind of person), did not know anyone by name. I prepared him before we took the walk. I said "we will probably run into lots of people, because I know lots of people, so just smile and say hi." And that's exactly what he did.

Now if this took place a few years ago, he would have told me "don't talk to anyone, let's cross the street". But I had a good talk with him and told him "you need to better your social skills, or people will think you are stuck up" He had no clue that this is how most people perceived him.

Well, you should have seen the look on his face when we walked down the block to my friend's Vivian's porch (I sit on this porch ever night from 6 p.m. till 8 p.m. ) and we all get together. So as we pass by, there's the dog on the porch wagging it's tail and it gets a load of Alan and starts to bark. I went up to the dog "BABE" and said "Babe, this is Alan, now make nice" I told Alan to calmly approach and talk in a soft voice. Now when Alan passes by Babe doesn't bark and Alan goes "hi Babe". It's the same with Whitey, Angel, Nunzio, Tabitha, and Parmigiana". All the dogs on that block. Oh, and there is Shep. He's a great big German Shephard who no one will go near. He is always on a leash. Even the people who live next door won't go near him. He has a reputation for tearing your head off. Took him a long time to like me. His owner, my friend Maureen, lost her son on 911. So I tried to hug her one day and the dog went for me. I never had that happen. She said "no one can approach me. No one". Still true to this day. If she's walking with the dog, you can't go near her. But once she's sitting on her porch and the dog is there, I can bend down and pat him. He has to smell me first.
And I have to bend down very slowly. No harsh movements.


Alan would never go near this dog!!!

Alan calls me the Mayor of Bensonhurst. When I was in the hospital and almost died from Gallbladder surgery, they actually knocked on our door, grabbed Alan and brought him out to where all our neighbors were sitting across the street and he had to give them blow by blows of what was happening to me in the hospital. One neighbor actually had him sitting in the porch room with all the other neighbors having coffee and talking about me. Alan had never did this in his entire life. He is not comfortable doing this. But I guess being married to me, he had to get out of his comfort zone.

Now he's still not going out and sitting on anyone's porch but when he walks around the corner, everybody knows him, says hi and he greets the people.

Believe me, if he didn't marry me, he would still be in a rooming house, in his room, going to work, and eating on a hot plate. This is from his own lips.

He didn't have a clue how to socialize. He probably has some asperger traits going on himself. I think it's all about conditioning. If you do something over and over, and you get a positive response, well the next time you do it, it's not so hard.

Took him until the age of 59 to understand this process. But he does.

See, because I really have no family I can call up in an emergency, it's nice to know that god forbid, if something happens, there are 50 people on my block and 100 people around the corner, that we can go and knock on their doors and say "hi, can you help me for a moment?"

It's important.

Thank god, I don't live in the woods like my friend does. She doesn't know a soul. She can't walk anywhere and she has to drive to another town to go shopping. I have never led that kind of life, so I don't know if I could adjust.

But I'm an adjustable kind of person so I guess if I had to, I would.

I would also go to a community center and meet everybody.

Know what I did when I first moved into this neighborhood 15 years ago??

The first night, I went into every store around the corner, introduced myself, said my name, got their name, and said "Hi, I'm knew and just wanted to introduce myself". By the next day, I knew everybody and everybody knew me. Yeah, most people gossip when you live so close to each other's homes. But it goes along with the territory.

I can honestly say, I do not suffer from any kind of social anxiety disorder". LOL

That is one disorder I know I don't have. Now phobias, ... that's a whole other story.

lol
Melody