Meeting Your “Gran Torino” Moment

We all end up getting there.

There is a moment in life when you realize that you have turned into Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. I believe I have found mine.

My neighborhood here in Athens is a residential one, called Five Points, just off the campus of the University of Georgia. I’m a 10-minute walk from Stegeman Coliseum, where the Georgia basketball teams play, and about a 20-minute walk from Sanford Stadium, where the football team plays. If you’ve read my novel How Lucky, you know this neighborhood well because it’s where the narrator and protagonist Daniel lives. I had him reside roughly where I reside just to keep it simple; I was already putting so much work and research into trying to write the book from the perspective of someone with a disability that I don’t have that I figured I’d lower the difficulty elsewhere by having him essentially live where I do. At the very least, I could be sure I’d get the streets right.

When we moved here from New York City in 2013, when this house had only three people living in it rather than four, it was the unofficial policy of realtors in Five Points to try to show open houses only to adults, rather than college students, to maintain a community of grownups and families rather than a community of people wandering home from frat parties and vomiting on the front lawn. Over the last 11 years, as everything in this country has become more end-stage, zero-sum, get-yours-while-you-can-before-everything-explodes craven and shameless, this has changed: The neighborhood has been slowly infiltrated by Airbnb owners who don’t even live in town (something we’re trying to do something about) and college students whose wealthy parents, already paying exorbitant college tuitions, will buy a house when their kid is a freshman and flip it when they graduate, which is great for their portfolios but lousy for anyone who actually lives in the town where their kid goes to school. But it’s fine. It’s still a nice neighborhood. You figure it out. I’m not too far from having a couple of front-lawn-vomiting college students in this house myself, after all. Everybody complains about These Kids Today, except when they’re their kids.

But it is undeniable that there is lot more of everything in the neighborhood: More college students, more noise, more…