Why I'm happy I fell off a moving truck

Some thoughts on why helping people isn't altruistic

A couple of weeks ago, I fell off a moving truck. A misstep as I climbed down, slow-motion fall like a stunt fall, a full on sprawl on the ground. I was fine, except for a bruised shin. My neighbors, whose truck it was, pulled out the chairs we’d been about to load, and we sat there drinking kombucha and just being, no sense of hurry despite the intensity of the day’s project, until my scattered dignity collected itself. Now, the last of the bruise is invisible. The purple is gone, leaving just a tenderness when I run my hand down my shin. My neighbors are gone too, with their moving truck, and their handmade end table and camping gear and living cherry tree.

We shared an alley, so I’d see them when I took out the trash. She’d be coming home from her job as a primary care doctor in her blue scrubs. He’d be loading or unloading a paddle board or tools into his car. Or we’d see them when we were out walking the dog and they’d be walking up the hill with coffee to stand in the sun, a little Pacific Northwest pilgrimage.

“How’s it going?” I’d ask, the little ritual, how-are-you-fine-thanks-and-you.

“Good. Really good,” he’d say, with the kind of slow, appreciative inhalation most people save for a good rose. And my little annoyances and preoccupations would shrivel. I was good too, I remembered. They were people I was always glad to see.

But it was the maggots that really started the friendship. A and I were dumping some compost in the green bin and found a seriously impressive squirming mass of maggots when our neighbor drove up. She heard us exclaiming and came over to look, and we stood there in delicious disgusted wonder together. It’s not everyone who appreciates a good green bin full of maggots.

I’m going to really miss them.

The silly thing is, we hung out more in the weeks before their move than the whole two years we were neighbors. We had them over for dinner a couple of times over the years and always said hi, but that was about it. We always meant to hang out, but it didn’t quite happen. Then they started moving, and suddenly there were all these reasons to reach out. I helped load their rescued cherry tree into their car and went home eating its cherries. I adopted their abandoned bottles of mustard and pickled peppers and wine. I let them put their free pile in my parking strip and store their bicycle in my yard. I helped them load their truck.

I did all this, yes, because they could use help, but also because it felt good. This wasn’t some kind of abstract altruism. It was friendship, neighborliness. It was fun, and not just because I got a jar of peppers.

It’s got me thinking about how great it is to ask for help. To lean on each other. A long time ago, when we were both working on novels that dealt with intentional communities¹, my longtime writing mentor David James Duncan said something to the effect of that the problem with intentional communities was that what actually got people to stick together was necessity. “We’ve got to need each other. It’s unintentional communities that work.”² Like so often, I think he’s right. Helping is how we belong. Otherwise, we’re just waving to each other in the alley.

Many years ago, before I formed the mature opinion that dog parks are dens of filth, I took young Squinch to the dog park on a day they happened to be having a work party. I asked one of the regulars, whom I chatted with pretty often, how I could help. Oh, you don’t need to do anything, he said, like he was offering me a great favor. I never felt like I really belonged there again, even before then-three-year-old A face planted into the dog-piss-infused dust.

So this is what I think: helping each other is good. (Wow, yep, controversial thoughts here.) There’s more to say about why it feels uncomfortable to ask for help, but I’m going to instead say something that is controversial: nuclear families are hard on community. Do you remember that shift (did this happen to you?) when friends turned inward into couples and little families, the group houses emptied out, the spontaneous hangouts stopped, and people stopped needing people beside their person so much? (I picture two hands, fingers so interlocked that they form a smooth mass, nothing reaching out, nothing to grab.) It might be a juicy, nourishing, joyful nucleus, but still, it seems to me that this self-contained structure often makes other bonds weaken. Reaching past that little nucleus is suddenly extra. I’m talking tendencies and patterns here, not everybody. (The owning a house as the ticket to middle-class financial stability piece is part of it too.)

And I’m thinking about how good it felt when we landed in a co-op preschool after the pandemic toddler solo parenting years, and suddenly there were people spontaneously going to the park together, or watching each other’s kids, or passing down clothes, or just saying hello human you made it through breakfast to each other in our sweatpants with our unbrushed hair. It was the feeling of having daily useful cooperative community that was bigger than our families. It’s probably obvious that I needed that as a single parent, but everybody else needed it too. We gulped it in, sometimes desperately.

I guess my point is, reach out, now, while we’re both still here. Hire A to sit your cat. Ask me to babysit. Water my garden and I’ll water yours. Send out a group chat if you’re heading to the playground. Come borrow an egg. Ask friend-experts questions instead of just googling. Call me on your commute or if you’re sad. Send A your kid’s hand-me-downs or we can send you ours. It will pay off in so much more than peppers.

Let’s look at maggots and sunrises together. Because for real, I’d rather fall off your moving truck than sit at home alone.

1. His is out this last year: Sun House. Have you read it yet? There are places in that novel that are now places in my mind. Are they places in yours too? Then I’ll meet you at Jade Lake some day or some dream.

2. This is not an actual quote. It was a loooong time ago.