THE BELL CURVE:Spirit of community lives on

On New Year’s Day, while my household was in a kind of post-holiday torpor, the front doorbell rang and the dog went into her defensive paranoia when strangers appear suddenly. When I opened the door, Nancy and Nita, our neighbors, were standing on the front steps. Behind them was a child’s wagon, full of cooking dishes. One of the dishes was sending steam into the crisp January air.

Nancy handed me a paper that told the story of black-eyed peas being spared by northern troops burning Confederate crops because they thought the black-eyed peas were weeds. As a result, starving southerners had something to eat and have thus considered black-eyed peas lucky ever since, a feeling nourished by the ability of the peas to grow in the poorest of soil and leading to a superstition that has survived into two centuries.

The steam from the wagon turned out to be a pot of black-eyed peas, to which Nancy and Nita had added “cabbage for money and cornbread for love.” The cabbage was slaw, and they were serving up paper dishes of any or all of their wagon load, along with their wishes for a happy and productive new year. The neighborhood had struck again.

The Christmas holidays have always offered a special venue for the neighborhood to express its heart. Happily, the removal of our identity as Santa Ana Heights hasn’t changed our nature. Neither has annexation by Newport Beach nor the sign that now calls us Bayshore. We still throw an Easter egg hunt and have a communal dinner for all every Thursday and support one another in countless ways. But the Christmas holidays are when we really shine. It starts with the luminaries that grace our streets on Christmas Eve and ended this year with Nancy and Nita and their wagon of good will. In between, there was the usual neighborhood Christmas party, hosted in three different homes. .

Like the baseball sitting on my desk. It rests in a replica of a seat at Wrigley Field in Chicago and was given to me while the Altobelli family, young and old, was filling bags with sand and candles on Christmas Eve. An inscription on the ball that said “Forever Fan Patricia Altobelli, 2006” was a posthumous holiday greeting to her neighbors from her own branch of heaven from where Pat Altobelli, who died last year, can continue her lifelong vigil to get her beloved Chicago Cubs into the World Series.

Then there was Treb Heining, our neighborhood balloon man written up in these pages last week, who missed New Year’s Eve at home because he was in New York, high above Times Square, casting confetti out over the celebrants gathered there to watch the ball drop on 2006. As always, Treb had a contingent of locals who journeyed to New York to help in the casting. My family got in on this neighborhood perk some years ago, stationed atop a theater marquee and serving as “confetti disposal engineers” — as Treb preferred to call us.

Already, one former neighborhood family has set up shop at the head of the line for next year’s confetti shower, following the lead of this year’s confetti engineers Ned and Sally Rose, who moved out of the neighborhood but not out of its reach or its heart. Then there were the communiqués about the four members of the Darling family, who were on a trip to Thailand when terrorist bombs hit Bangkok. The e-mails didn’t quiet down until it was established and properly reported that the Darlings had moved out of Bangkok before the bombers struck.

We’ve lived in this neighborhood for 23 years, and it has always been this way. My peers have raised and sent out into the world from Santa Ana Heights a whole generation of kids who have now been supplanted by a new generation that seems to have picked up on the traditions already firmly in place. It says something about those traditions when kids who grew up here often return to reprise the celebrations they remember from childhood. The names and faces have changed, but not the devotion to the neighborhood. Or the sense of looking after our own.

We do a terrific job of that — especially for the lonely in our midst. And especially at Christmas time, when a knock on the door might well be a wagon load of black-eyed peas saying this is indeed a lucky place in which to live.