Our post-neighborly existence

RIP Maurice Goode, 1933-2025

I received word today that an old neighbor passed away. Maurie Goode lived next door when we were growing up on West Ashland in Indianola, Iowa, along with his wife and two kids. I knew him when I was an adolescent/teenager, but then many years later when my wife and I ended up buying the house I grew up in from my dad, Maurie and Mary still lived next door. So I got to have him as a neighbor again for a few years.

This is not intended as a tribute or remembrance of his whole life; out of respect I’ll leave that to his family and those who knew him better than I did. But as I was thinking about Maurie today, I realized that to me he represents something that’s essentially now lost.

See, Maurie was an extremely friendly guy. Ask anyone who knew him: he always had a smile on his face and when I think of him, I imagine him laughing. Just an all-around nice person, and a kind person. But also, one of the things I recall most about him was how he always had conservative talk radio on in his garage. I’d be outside, working in mine or maybe playing with my kids, and Rush Limbaugh’s voice would be blaring from next door. Seemed like it got louder every time I heard it.

And yet, somehow I loved my neighbor. I am, to be sure, the polar opposite in most ways of a person who listened faithfully to Rush Limbaugh. But there was this thing that we’ve now lost, and you can define it a lot of different ways. It’s not just being friends with the opposing party. That’s too oversimplified, and some people still try to make that work. I’m talking more about an internal stance: the way I feel about someone is now irrevocably broken if I find out they voted for Trump, or they support right wing ideologies, or whatever. I can’t get past it, even if I can be friendly on a surface level. (To be clear, I don’t know who Maurie voted for, ever. I’m just speaking in generalities now.)

And maybe that’s my own problem, yeah. But I think it’s a more universal problem than we all want to admit. I think way too many of us have passed that point where we can still internally love someone once we know and abhor their political views.

So many causes. I can’t get into them all, but yes, we know too much about each other at this point in the world. It’s all broken beyond repair, and it occurs to me that the loss of my old neighbor is perfectly emblematic of that thing we no longer have. To me, he represents that intangible thing perfectly, and his passing comes at exactly the time it should. We aren’t those people anymore.

A postscript: in my world, memories are often tied to material things, and those material things often had engines and wheels. So I’m including a couple photos here of my driveway and/or house when I was a teenager, because in the background you can see Maurie’s Ford pickup and then his “family” car, a gigantic gray Lincoln Continental.

A post-postscript: I’m also including a photo of Maurie from his days playing in a country band (“Maurie Goode and the Country Boys”). He and the boys had a standing gig at a Des Moines hotel lounge every week for many years, and they were known around the area pretty well. All these memories of him as a neighbor are intertwined with images of him loading amps and guitars into his truck like clockwork. I don’t know whose photo that one is; it’s got no source where I found it.