COUNTY LINES; A Friendship From Another Time

ONE of the striking things about the baby boom generation is that we're the first generation to think of the good old days as cul de sacs, split levels and car pools.
True, Westchester is the rare suburban area with a past as well as a present. But, for the most part, we're the first generation able to get nostalgic about suburbia.
Like most nostalgia it gets part of the picture, at best. There are some things that are better about suburbs now (fancier houses, a little more diversity, more organized activities for kids) and some things that are worse (more traffic, more pressure, not enough unorganized activities for kids), but it's hard to spend much time in Westchester and think life is appreciably better or worse now than it was 30 years ago.
Still, I find myself thinking a lot about my father and our neighbor Gilbert, who lived next door to us the whole time I was growing up on Long Island. And here's my thought: it's hard for me to imagine anyone anywhere in the New York suburbs having a better, richer, more lasting friendship with a neighbor than they did. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having one as good.
It's partly the random walk of life -- you don't pick your neighbors. Sometimes you draw John Wayne and sometimes you draw John Rocker. But it's also different times.
It's hard to summarize the roles Gilbert played for my father. He was a great friend, whether riding shotgun on the Sunday trips to get bagels and lox or waltzing in with malicious glee to intentionally bring bad luck as my father crouched by the television agonizing over some ill-fated football bet. He was a reassuring presence, the one who could fix every broken commode or repair every broken lock, who built a precise copy of a famous Isamu Noguchi sculpture to display in his backyard rock garden while my father was holding his car fenders together with fiberglass tape.
Gilbert never went to college, but he knew everything -- the names of birds and trees, German Expressionist painting, obscure bits of medical trivia -- so much so that he once casually diagnosed his barber's eye ailment and for years afterward was greeted with a respectful, ''Good afternoon, doc,'' by the barber, who wrongly assumed he was a physician. When, I pulled off a particularly stupid prank once, coming home from college unexpectedly and simulating a break-in at our house, my father jumped out of bed and knew just what to do. He ran out the door in his pajamas and yelled for Gilbert.
Our parents went on vacations together, had pizza and beer together and remained close long after the kids grew up and both families moved away. And when Gilbert got sick a few years back, my father visited him regularly like a brother. When he died, and we had a memorial service for him, we all cried, but my father's tears seemed to come from the deepest place of all. ''He was the best friend anyone could have,'' my father said. ''And I miss him.''
As I said, it was a different time, for better and for worse. Everyone was back from World War II at the same time, everyone was raising a family at the same time, everyone's children were the same age. People didn't move as much or feel obligated to trade up to more luxurious digs. Life was not as structured, and people's houses tended to be plain old suburban ranches or split levels on cheek-to-jowl lots instead of fancy places on big pieces of land. Gilbert walked in and out of our house like Kramer in ''Seinfeld'' or a character from a suburban sitcom, but it's hard to imagine someone walking in and out of our house in the same way today. We're too busy, and our neighbors are too.
I try to think of Gilbert as someone's neighbor today, but I can't quite get the picture right. Maybe he'd be in some horrible humongous McMansion, where no one knows their neighbors. Maybe, in the interest of meeting contemporary standards of Good Dad-dom, he'd be out car-pooling or hanging out at soccer games he had no interest in or maybe he'd have some power job and would never be around.
There's much debate about the bowling alone syndrome -- the notion that communal activities that once linked people are less common now than in the past -- that instead of joining bowling leagues, people are more apt to bowl alone. I don't know about the bowling part, but the big point has the ring of truth. So when I think about Gilbert, I often think he could live next door to me, and I might barely know who he is.
Which is not to say life was better then. Just different. I guess.