My first wife and I moved out here in 1967. Leaving Manhattan for Staten Island was an action incomprehensible to virtually everyone we knew on that tight little island. Our arrival here proved no less inexplicable to most members of our new community.

For one thing, our ethnic and cultural backgrounds and (at that time) eccentric appearances aside, we weren't particularly inclined to conform to certain quaint Island customs. When we started house-hunting in 1969, one real-estate agent took us to look at something mid-island - I can't remember exactly where - and, after showing us the house, told us that the neighbors all had an agreement, if I knew what he meant. I said I didn't, which forced him to explain. In a whisper (as if lowering his voice made it any less illegal or immoral) he informed us that no one in a six-block radius would sell to "a colored." I told him we'd catch a bus home, and not to call again.

So we decided to concentrate our looking in Stapleton, where racism, which deeply offended both of us, was at least less overt. The house we ended up buying, what everyone called "the old McDermott place" on Van Duzer near Court, suited us fine: lots of space, a small garden, an off-street parking space and a view across the Stapleton valley. It was priced in the low twenties; my mom lent us the down payment, and we took occupancy in late 1969. I learned later that the neighbors were thankful that, though we obviously qualified as what they called "hippies," we weren't of the melanin persuasion.

Things change. A few years later we got new neighbors on one side; he was a local entrepreneur, she was a housewife, and they merged the teenaged progeny of two marriages - four on his side, three on hers - into a next-door version of Eight is Enough. He'd trained his own kids, and his dogs, to hate Blacks on sight, spewed his venom casually, and scared me half to death late one night when he showed up at my front door with his shotgun, ready to "protect" me from a Black friend of mine who'd stopped by for a late visit, whom he'd assumed was burglarizing the place.

Steve (as I'll call the husband) was a hard case, and his gentle, diminutive wife - let's call her Susan - didn't actively oppose this attitude, but her heart really wasn't in it. She couldn't help herself: she just loved people, so long as they were decent types. She saw her husband's rage infecting not only his kids but hers as well - not to mention the Dobermans. They'd yowl and slaver through the storm windows at any Black person who walked by the house on the sidewalk, twenty feet away. I was visiting one day when they let loose; the racket was deafening, it was like sitting inside the heart of fear.

Once, she confided in me, she'd taken one for a walk to the bank on Tappen Park on a drizzly day when - on the opposite sidewalk - a Black man raised his umbrella to open it. The dog tore its leash out of her grip, raced across the street, snatched the umbrella, ripped it to shreds and then backed the man up against a fence, snarling with menace. "That poor man," she muttered. "He must have been terrified. I kept apologizing, and gave him money for a new umbrella, but I'm sure he thought I'd taught the dog to act that way."

Susan adored her new home, into which both she and her husband put much money and hard work. About three years after they settled in, another family on our row with whom they'd become friendly suddenly moved to Florida - with no advance notice, over a holiday weekend, embarrassed because they'd sold their house to a Black family, the first on our block.

I didn't pay this much mind, aside from stopping by to say hello and welcome the latest arrivals. But a week later I was out clearing up my back yard when Susan came out into her rear garden. We exchanged hellos over the fence, and then she asked, "Allan, are you thinking of moving?" No, I answered; why? "Well, I overheard you talking on your terrace with some of your friends the other day, and I thought you said something about leaving." No, she must have been mistaken, I said. She seemed unusually relieved, so I asked why she thought I'd want to leave. "Because of our new neighbors," she replied. "Steve is furious; after all the work and money we put into the house, he says the neighborhood's going down the tubes."

I could see she wanted some reassurance, so I paused to think for moment. "Do you know how much I paid for my house?" I inquired. She didn't, so I told her. "Now how much did you pay for yours?" The figure was much higher. "And your house is smaller than mine, right?" She agreed. "So when you paid more for your house than I paid for mine, you and Steve drove my property values up, didn't you?" She agreed again. "Now what did these new arrivals pay for their house?" It was an even higher figure - seems she'd already introduced herself to them and found out. "And their house is smaller than yours, isn't it?" She nodded. "Well, then they drove up both of our property values, wouldn't you say?"

She looked at me, speechless. "You know," I mused, "real estate soars in successfully integrated neighborhoods. From my standpoint, the only thing better than Black people moving in would be if one of these houses sold to a gay couple; then the prices around here would really skyrocket!"

She burst out laughing. Steve, of course, was rabidly homophobic, along with all his other prejudices, and she knew it, and knew that I knew it as well. "Tell Steve I said he's got nothing to worry about," I told her. We chortled for a moment; then she confided, "Allan, I love this place. I grew up down the hill, and when I was a little girl I would look up at this house and say to myself, 'One day I'm going to live there.' I hope we never leave."

Well, to make a long story short, Susan eventually got rid of that husband but kept the house, living there first by herself, then with one of her stepsons, eventually selling it to him when she got remarried. She still comes to visit frequently.

I saw her just yesterday. Somewhere in the conversation she remarked, "One of the first things I said to my new husband when we started to date was, 'I've got two good friends, a couple, who are gay. One's Black, one's white. Do you have any problems with that? Because if you do, we're probably not right for each other."

As Marilyn French wrote in her great novel The Women's Room, "Things change, but more slowly than we do."