The last word: Who says I’m too old for a sleepover?

The alarm on my cell phone rang at 5:50 a.m., and I awoke to find myself in a twin bed in a spare room at my neighbor Lou’s house.

Lou was 81. His six children were grown and scattered around the country, and he lived alone, two doors down from me. His wife, Edie, had died five years earlier. “When people learn you’ve lost your wife,” he told me, “they all ask the same question. ‘How long were you married?’ And when you tell them 52 years, they say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ But I tell them no, it isn’t. I was just getting to know her.”

Lou had said he gets up at 6 o’clock, but after 10 more minutes, I heard nothing from his room down the hall. Had he died? He had a heart ailment, but generally was in good health. With a full head of silver-gray hair, bright hazel-blue eyes, and a broad chest, he walked with the confident bearing of a man who had enjoyed a long and successful career as a surgeon.

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The previous evening, as I’d left home, the last words I heard before I shut the door had been, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

It was a calamity several years ago on my street, in a middle-class suburb of Rochester, N.Y., that got me thinking about this. One night, a neighbor shot and killed his wife and then himself; their two middle-school-age children ran screaming into the night. Though the couple had lived on our street for seven years, my wife and I hardly knew them. We’d see them jogging together. Sometimes our children would carpool.

Some of the neighbors attended the funerals and called on relatives. Someone laid a single bunch of yellow flowers at the family’s front door, but nothing else was done to mark the loss. Within weeks, the children had moved with their grandparents to another part of town. The only indication that anything had changed was the “For Sale” sign on the lawn.

A family had vanished, yet the impact on our neighborhood was slight. How could that be? Did I live in a community or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives were entirely separate? Few of my neighbors, I later learned, knew others on the street more than casually; many didn’t know even the names of those a few doors down.

According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998, the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one-third. Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began 20 years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines, and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?

Maybe my neighbors didn’t mind living this way, but I did. I wanted to get to know the people whose houses I passed each day—not just what they do for a living and how many children they have, but the depth of their experience and what kind of people they are.

What would it take, I wondered, to penetrate the barriers between us? I thought about childhood sleepovers and the insight I used to get from waking up inside a friend’s home. Would my neighbors let me sleep over and write about their lives from inside their own houses?

A little more than a year after the murder-suicide, I began to telephone my neighbors and send e-mail messages; in some cases, I just walked up to the door and rang the bell. The first one turned me down, but then I called Lou. “You can write about me, but it will be boring,” he warned. “I have nothing going on in my life—nothing. My life is zero. I don’t do anything.”

That turned out not to be true. When Lou finally awoke that morning at 6:18, he and I shared breakfast. Then he lay on a couch in his study and, skipping his morning nap, told me about his grandparents’ immigration, his Catholic upbringing, his admission to medical school despite anti-Italian quotas, and how he met and courted his wife, built a career, and raised a family.

Later, we went to the YMCA for his regular workout; he mostly just kibitzed with friends. We ate lunch. He took a nap. We watched the business news. That evening, he made us dinner and talked of friends he’d lost, his concerns for his children’s futures, and his own mortality.

Before I left, Lou told me how to get into his house in case of an emergency, and I told him where I hide my spare key. That evening, as I carried my bag home, I felt that in my neighbor’s house lived a person I actually knew.

Not all of the other neighbors I approached about sleeping over said yes, of course. A real estate investor down the street dodged my calls for several weeks. One afternoon, while walking my dog, I spotted him in his car in his driveway, talking on a cell phone. I stood nearby waiting until he finished; he saw me, but let me stand there for a good 10 minutes while he kept talking. Finally, he got out of his car, and I explained very briefly what I had in mind. He came up very close to me, jabbed his cell phone towards my chest, and said, “I am a very private person. You might say I am pathologically private. And I wouldn’t ever want to see anything about me, my family, or my business in print.”

Still, of the 18 or so neighbors I did contact, more than half said yes. There was the recently married young couple, both working in business. They had no children, but plenty of empty bedrooms for me to choose from. She worked from home and after breakfast let me sit in her office while she e-mailed and made phone calls to clients. Later, I accompanied her as she walked her golden retriever around the block.

As we walked, I pointed to houses on both sides of our street and asked if she knew the people living there. “No, no clue, nope,” were her responses. She said she did recognize a few residents as members of her sports club, but as for the rest—despite having lived on the street for more than three years—she had no relationships with any of them “other than waving,” as she put it.

Did she meet people while walking the dog?

“You can have a brief conversation with people,” she said, “but then you notice that it’s the same conversation—the same chitchat—10 times. And then there’s the thing where people introduce their dogs and not themselves! What’s with that? And the really irritating thing,” she continued, grimacing, “I’ve started doing it myself.”

Some weeks later, a pathologist and his wife, a pediatrician, invited me to stay over. Their house is a handsome 1930s Tudor; I slept in a room over the garage that originally was the maid’s quarters. It was a Sunday evening and I enjoyed a family-style dinner with them and their two middle-school-age children.

Afterward, my neighbor sat at his grand piano. He began with scales, then chord progressions. His wife, seated on the sofa beside me, put down her sewing and raised both eyebrows at me as if to say, “This is a surprise!” His playing lasted about 20 minutes and included portions of a Brahms Intermezzo and Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier. When he was done, in a stage whisper, his wife said to me, “I’ve never heard him play for anyone but his mother.”

In the morning, the first alarm from one of the children’s rooms came at 6, and for the next hour I witnessed the hectic but happy scene of a family getting itself up and out for school and work. Then my host let me ride with him to his lab at the hospital, and before he had to leave for a closed meeting with other pathologists, let me look through a two-headed microscope as he examined blood and tissue samples: a close-up viewing of another world, I thought, not unlike what I’d been fortunate to experience inside my neighbor’s house.

Eventually, I met a woman living three doors away, the opposite direction from Lou, who was seriously ill with breast cancer and in need of help. She had recently divorced and had two young daughters, one in middle school and the other just starting kindergarten. My goal shifted: Instead of trying simply to enrich our lives by communicating more, I wondered if we could build a supportive community around this woman—in effect, patch together a real neighborhood. Lou and I and some of the other neighbors ended up taking turns driving her to the supermarket and to doctors’ appointments and watching her children.

Lou, in fact, didn’t just drive her to her doctor’s appointments. On the several occasions when the doctor’s lagging schedule threatened to maroon her in the waiting room for hours, Lou pulled rank as a retired surgeon and managed to get her into the examination room. He was also concerned about her safety at home. Noting a dim bulb over a stairway leading up to her bedroom—“You’ll fall on these steps, young lady!” he warned—Lou demanded her brother come over and install a brighter light.

Sadly, a few months later, our neighbor died. As her relatives began to arrive from out of town, I decided to buy a tray of cold cuts to take over to the house.

Lou called me on my cell phone while I was at the supermarket. “You want to make it a little special?” he asked. “Buy one long-stemmed rose and tape it to the top cover of the container.” I did, and when I arrived at the house, our neighbor’s 6-year-old daughter gently removed the rose and placed it on the chair where her mother used to rock her.

Lou himself died last spring. In the few years since I’d dared to invite myself into his life, I had the privilege to be his friend.

This campaign season, our political leaders have been speaking of crossing party lines to achieve greater unity. Maybe we should all first cross the invisible lines between our homes and achieve greater unity in the places we live.

Probably we don’t need to sleep over. All it might take is to make a phone call, send a note, or ring a bell. Why not try it today?

Adapted by the author from an article originally published by The New York Times. The story is drawn from a book Lovenheim is writing about how Americans live today as neighbors. ©2008 by Peter Lovenheim. All rights reserved.