Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Haddam, in these devil’s details, stopped being a quiet and happy suburb, stopped being subordinate to any other place and became a place to itself, only without having a fixed municipal substance. It became a town of others, for others. You could say it lacked a soul, which would explain why somebody thinks it needs an interpretive center and why it seems like a good idea to celebrate a village past. The present is here, but you can’t feel its weight in your hand.

Back in the days when I got into the realty business, we used to laugh about homogeneity: buying it, selling it, promoting it, eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It seemed good — in the way that everyone in the state having the same color license plate was good (though now that’s different, too). And since the benefits of fitting in were manifest and densely woven through, homogenizing seemed like a sort of inverse pioneering. But by 1992, even homogeneity had gotten homogenized. Something had hardened in Haddam, so that having a decent house on a safe street, with like-minded neighbors and can’t-miss equity growth — a home as a natural extension of what was wanted from life, a sort of minor-league Manifest Destiny — all that now seemed to piss people off, instead of making them ecstatic (which is how I expected people to feel when I sold them a house: happy). The redemptive theme in the civic drama had been lost. And realty itself — stage manager to that drama — had stopped signaling our faith in the future, our determination not to give in to dread, our blitheness in the face of life’s epochal slowdown.

In short, as I stood out on Cleveland Street watching green-suited Bekins men tote my blanketed belongings up the ramp under matching green-leaf, sun-shot oaks and chestnuts just showing the pastel stains of autumn 1992, I felt Haddam had entered its period of eralessness. It had become the emperor’s new suburb, a place where maybe someone might set a bomb off just to attract its attention. The mystics would say it had lost its crucial sense of East. Though east, to the very edge, was the direction I was then taking.

T he circumstances of my Sponsor visit this afternoon — in Haddam, of all places — are not entirely the standard ones. Normally, my Sponsoring activity is centered on the seaside communities up Barnegat Neck, where I know practically no one and typically can swing by someone’s house or office, or maybe make a meeting in a mall or a sub shop, not use up a whole afternoon and be back at my desk in an hour and change. But yesterday, due to other volunteers wanting off for Thanksgiving, I received a call wondering if I might be going to Haddam today, and if so, could I make a Sponsor stop. I’ve kept my name on the Haddam list since I’m regularly in and out of town, know relatively few people anymore, and because — as I’ve said — I know the town can leave people feeling dismal and friendless, even though every civic nook, cranny and nail hole is charming, well-rounded and defended, and as seemingly caring, congenial and immune to misery as a fairy-tale village in Switzerland.

Sally actually prompted my first Sponsor visits four years back. She’d grown depressed by her own work — a company that mini-bused terminally ill Jerseyites to see Broadway plays, provided dinner at Mama Leone’s and a tee-shirt that said Still Kickin’ in NJ, then bused them home. Constant company with the dying, staying upbeat all the time, sitting through Fiddler on the Roof and Les Misérables, then having to talk about it all for hours, finally proved a draw-down on her spirits after more than a decade. Plus, the dying complained ceaselessly about the service, the theater seats, the food, the acting, the weather, the suspension system on the bus — which caused employee turnover and inspired the ones who stayed to steal from the oldsters and treat them sarcastically, so that lawsuits seemed just around the corner.

In 1996, she sold the business and was at home in Sea-Clift for a summer with not enough to do. She read a story in the Shore Plain Dealer, our local weekly, that declared the average American to have 9.5 friends. Republicans, it said, typically had more than Democrats. This was easy to believe, since Republicans are genetically willing to trust the surface nature of everything, which is where most friendships thrive, whereas Democrats are forever getting mired in the meaning of every goddamn thing, suffering doubts, regretting their actions and growing angry, resentful and insistent, which is where friendships languish. The Plain Dealer said that though 9.5 might seem like plenty of friends, statistics lied, and that many functioning, genial, not terminally ill, incapacitated or drug-addicted people, in fact, had no friends. And quite a few of these friendless souls — which was the local hook — lived in Ocean County and were people you saw every day. This, the writer editorialized, was a helluva note in a bounteous state like ours, and represented, in his view, an “epidemic” of friendlessness (which sounded extreme to me).

Some people over in Ocean County Human Services, in Toms River, apparently read the Plain Dealer story and decided to take the problem of friendlessness into their own hands, and in no time at all got an 877 “Sponsor Line” authorized that would get a person visited by another tolerant and feeling human not of their acquaintance within twenty-four hours of a call. This Sponsor-visitor would be somebody who’d been certified not to be a pedophile, a fetishist, a voyeur or a recent divorcée, and also not simply someone as lonely as the caller. The cost of a visit would be zilch, though there was a charities list on a Web site someplace, and contributions were anonymous.

Sally got wind of the Sponsor Line and called to inquire that very afternoon — it was in September — and went over for a screening interview and, probably because of her work with the dying, got right onto the Sponsors list. The Human Services people had figured out a digitized elimination system to ensure that the same Sponsor wouldn’t visit the same caller more than once, ever. Callers themselves were screened by psych grad students and a profile was worked up using a series of five innocuous questions that ferreted out lurkers, stalkers, weenie wavers, bondage aficionados, self-published poets, etc.

The idea worked well right from the start and, in fact, still works great. Sally started going on one but sometimes three Sponsor visits a week, as far away as Long Branch and as close in as Seaside Heights. The idea pretty quickly caught on in other counties, including Delaware County, where Haddam is. A cross-referenced list of people like me who operate in a wider than ordinary geographical compass was compiled. And after signing up, I made Sponsor visits as far away as Cape May and Burlington — where I do some bank appraisals — or, as here in Haddam today, when I just happen to be in the neighborhood and have some time to kill. I originally thought I might snag a listing or two, or even a sale, since people often need a friend to give them advice about selling their house, and will sometimes make a decision based on feeling momentarily euphoric. Though that’s never happened, and in any case, it’s against all the guidelines.

Nothing technical’s required to be a Sponsor: a willingness to listen (which you need in liberal quantities as a realtor), a slice of common sense, an underdeveloped sense of irony, a liking for strangers and a capacity to be disengaged while staying sincerely focused on whatever question greets you when you walk in the door. There have been concerns that despite the grad student screening, innocent callers would be vulnerable if a bad-seed Sponsor made it through the net. But it’s been generally felt that the gain is more important than the modest statistical risk — and like I said, so far, so good.