My Changing Neighborhood

My Changing Neighborhood
By Paul Varnell
Copyright by The Chicago Free Press
March 14, 2007

I think of myself as a calm, even-tempered man, but a few things have begun to annoy me lately. I share them here on the off chance that you have noticed the same things.

Years ago when I came to Chicago, I moved specifically to Lakeview because it was the gay neighborhood. It was a bit bohemian, even a bit seedy, but it was friendly and tolerant—a fine place to live and flourish as a gay man. Sometimes people even nodded hello on the streets.

Now more than two decades later, the neighborhood is still disproportionately gay, but the tenor has changed. There seem to be more heterosexuals, specifically young heterosexuals. And the neighborhood is filling up with nail bars (whatever they are), coffee shops, hair salons and fashionable ethic restaurants. I don’t mind young heterosexuals so long as they behave but I’ve noticed a growing lack of common courtesy that seems unneighborly.

Perhaps most noticeable are the number of young women with baby carriages or strollers walking down the middle of the sidewalk. We didn’t used to see baby carriages in this neighborhood. But it isn’t their presence I mind so much as their regularly taking their half of the sidewalk out of the middle rather than obeying simple traffic rules of keeping to the right.

I once observed a woman pushing a baby carriage with one hand, talking into a cell phone she held to her ear and clutching the leash of her dog all at once. No, that’s too many hands. She must have had the dog tied to the baby carriage. But she was charging down the middle of the sidewalk, lost in her conversation, oblivious of other pedestrians—or her dog’s obvious needs.

More annoying still is the clotting behavior evident among young women who are wont to push their baby carriages down the sidewalk side by side, forcing pedestrians far to the edge of the walk. On the narrower sidewalks of side streets I have been forced off the sidewalk to avoid them, with no “Excuse us” or “Thank you” from the young women.

I have hard this sort of behavior called “Mommy Entitlement Syndrome”—an apt term. The idea seems to be that if they have a child, they have special rights and an immunity from criticism. Well, the simple act of reproducing, open to any human being and obviously unavoidable by many, does not get you privileges. Not in my book.

I have decided that in the future I will not step off the sidewalk. I will stand still and force them to go around me single file. I can probably get away with this because I am an official senior citizen, practically a protected class. Smiling pleasantly, I’ll say, “I’m sure you don’t mean to force elderly residents off the sidewalk.” I suspect anyone could do this. I encourage you to start.

It gets worse when the children are a little older. I was at the local library recently when I noticed a woman photocopying something while her little girl walked in the librarian’s office and started poking around among the books and paper. (The librarian was elsewhere at the moment.) I stared at the child and she guiltily ran back out. I walked on but looked back to see the child darting back into the office. When she saw me looking at her, she ran back out again.

Finally I walked over to the mother and said, “I don’t think your child should be playing in the librarian’s office.”

“I don’t have eyes in the back of my head!” she snapped, without looking up, and went on with her photocopying. I did not reply but next time, I think I will say something like, “It’s your child. Don’t inflict it on the rest of us.”

Another time I was at a local grocery store where two small children were running up and down the aisles among shoppers, laughing and yelling, while their mother calmly walked around gathering grocers. I waited a bit for the store manager to say something, then finally said to her, “Do you think you could control your children a little better?” She glared at me as if the very idea were offensive. Mommy entitlement syndrome!

I have less contact with young heterosexual men, whom I suppose are downtown at an office most of the time. Maybe it is just as well. One evening I was crossing a side street at the corner when a fashionable car came tearing up to the intersection (there was a stop sign) and came to a screeching halt a couple of yards short of me. I stopped in the middle of the street and stared disapprovingly at the young male driver. “Faggot!” he yelled.