NEIGHBORHOOD: What My Mother Taught Me About Dreaming Big

Note: These are my mother's words. Lee Byrd. She and I spoke at the Ysleta Independent School District Mother Daughter conference last week. My mother is a writer, editor and the co-publisher at Cinco Puntos Press. My speech follows hers.

Maybe you’re one of those people who dream about changing the world. I know I am. I know my daughter Susie Byrd is, too. In fact, when she was your age, she dreamed about becoming president of the United States. She was going to put an end to the death penalty. She talked about it a lot.

She was dreaming big which is a very good thing.

Dreaming big is, in fact, really important. But there are times in your life when your big dreams may get in the way of your seeing the treasure that’s right in front of you. I learned this from my mother, who was one heck of a big dreamer. Let me tell you about her.

My mother was born in 1906, in a little town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. If she were alive today, she would be 102.

My mother was a red head, an adventurous kid, full of ideas and experiments, always thinking of crazy things for her friends to do and hanging around with kids who were dumb enough to do them. Her father was from Scotland and made his living as a gardener so there wasn’t a whole lot of money for her to dream big with. But a doctor who lived close by must have noticed that my mother was a big dreamer and that there was something about her that would go far, because he decided to pay for her to go to Boston University. So in the early 1920s, when most women didn’t get past high school, my mother graduated from Boston University with a degree in business.

Ma taught school until 1935 when she met my father Eustace Merrill. They moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, and had us four kids. She raised us. She cared for us when we were sick, fixed our meals, took care of our house, shed tears over us when we failed and told everyone when we did well.

And it was there in that house where I grew up, that my mother taught us about neighborhood, about being a neighbor, about being involved in a community, especially the community that is right in front of you. My mother knew everyone in the neighborhood, she knew their kids. Through Ma, we knew everyone too. She lent things to the neighbors and she turned around and borrowed from them. She invited them over to play Scrabble, or to play cards, or for dinner or for her annual neighborhood Christmas party. And she and Dad went over to visit them, got to know them. The kids in the neighborhood played in our back yard because it was big and had a paved driveway and a basketball net and a long-roped swing underneath a huge oak tree.

Oh, she had her dreams, my mother did. Just like the rest of us, she had big dreams. But those dreams became real in the little things she did, in the very place where she chose to do them, there in our neighborhood.

My mother’s sense of neighborhood has been a blessing to me, a blessing and a legacy. In 1978, after moving from Alamosa, Colorado to Albuquerque and then Las Cruces, New Mexico, my husband and I and our three kids finally settled in El Paso, in a red brick bungalow on Louisville Street, right off Piedras, right down from the House of Pizza. We were so sick of moving that we decided that house on Louisville Street was just fine and we weren’t going to move again. And we’ve been there 30 years.

Almost right away, I wanted a neighborhood like the one I grew up in—not one that looked like my old New Jersey neighborhood, but one that felt like it. A community, a place where I knew everyone and they knew me. But how to go about making friends? I tried one lady across the street, someone about my age with kids about our kids’ age, but she didn’t seem too interested in knowing me. Maybe she hadn’t grown up in a real neighborhood herself—you know, a lot of people nowadays really don’t want to know their neighbors which I think is a real shame.

But there was another person down the street, a woman in her 30s who had mental retardation. Her name was Isabel. She thought she was nine years old. When she saw us unpacking our truck, she came down to visit right away. She saw our kids and decided they were perfect companions. And so she was at our house every day, playing with our kids—and what a treasure they thought she was: someone who looked like an adult but who had fun like a kid.

Through Isabel, I came to know her mother Benita and then her four brothers and two sisters and their families. Isabel’s father Lalo was friends with Mr. Acosta on the corner. Through Lalo, we met the Acosta family.

At night when we sat on our front porch, looking out at the lights of Juarez, we heard music. The Coulahans from across the street were sitting on their porch and listening to classical music.

There was a middle-aged bachelor next door, Art, and he liked to come out on his front porch late at night and sing old Elvis songs and he liked to sit in his living room and curse at the Dallas Cowboys when they weren’t playing very well. We could hear him from our porch.

Mrs. Pino was the neighborhood busybody. She had opinions about everyone’s house and yard, ours included, and she came over to tell us about them.

And so one house at a time, a neighborhood grew up around us. Some neighbors have moved, some have stayed, their children all grown up and coming back to visit us. They always stop in to say hi. The lady across the street who wasn’t interested in being friends with me moved, but not before we became really good friends. In her place came a woman named Terry Martinez who introduced me to Martha Garza on the corner. The three of us walked in the mornings and they taught me how to make friends by sharing all the small details of their lives. And then, the greatest thing of all, Susie and her husband Eddie and our grandkids moved into the house of the middle-aged bachelor Art when he left and so right there in the neighborhood I have all the great treasures of life: family, children, grandkids, dear friends and good good neighbors. When I think of the dreams I’ve dreamed, none could have been much better than watching this neighborhood become a reality.

And so I dream big in a small place, but I’m not constrained. And I want to encourage you to do the same: dream big, but never neglect the life and the people that God has put in front of you.