In the rush of life, good neighbors are easily taken for granted. Seven months ago, my wife and I lost a wonderful neighbor in Dan Levinson. Our relationship with Dan was quiet, steady, and understated. He died suddenly, and my sense of loss is more than I expected. I’ll try to express a little bit here of what I wish I’d told Dan when he was alive.
It was 2004 when my wife Barbara and I, and our children Benjamin and Elizabeth, moved to Woodward Street in Newton Highlands. Benjamin was eight years old and Elizabeth was four.
Dan and Cindy Levinson were our new next-door neighbors. Dan was an English and History teacher at Thayer Academy. Cindy did skillful and sensitive neuropsychological evaluations of children. Dan and Cindy were about 15 years older than Barbara and I, and their children were older, too. Cindy came out of the house to say hello the day we moved in. Dan, also friendly, was a little more reserved.
Through the years, we each tried to do the little things you do for neighbors — brought in the Globe when the other family was out of town, shoveled their front walk when the guy they hired hadn’t showed up. We shared news of life’s little victories and defeats.
Dan was philosophical about bad weather, misdelivered mail and Red Sox seasons gone down the drain.
I used to ask Dan what he thought was wrong with the Red Sox. He was skeptical that high-priced free agents help a team much but Dan said when the General Manager of the Red Sox sees his team floundering, he brings in some high-priced free agents — because it’s something he can do.
When I asked why Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe often came off as a sourpuss, Dan replied that he’d corresponded with Shaughnessy at least once, and found him argumentative — but he defended Shaughnessy by saying the fire in him was what kept his column glowing.
When I could no longer bear the erratic delivery of the Globe and canceled our subscription, I mentioned to Dan that I still missed the Globe‘s Sunday sports section. The following Sunday, I found the sports section tucked inside my screen door.
That generous gesture seemed to move us closer. We’d occasionally recommend a novel to one another. Several times, he invited me to join his regular pickle ball game at the Windsor Club.
When I said I never knew where to go to keep up with Newton city government news, Dan recommended the e-mail of Tarik Lucas.
His son Rich moved to Kingston, New York, married a woman named Jenn, and they had a son named Hugo, whom Dan delighted in seeing.
In 2018, when Cindy Levinson got a brain hemorrhage, Dan retired from Thayer Academy and took care of Cindy beautifully until she died in 2021.
A few months after Cindy’s passing, Barbara and I had Dan over to dinner. We sat in our back garden in the early evening. Dan was a delight, comfortable chatting at surface level or opening up about what it’s like to share a house with the memory of your departed wife.
The joking part of his nature was muted — but every once in a while Dan made a political crack, or noted the absurdity of trying to get a roomful of teenager students to discuss a piece of literature they haven’t read.
It got buggy in the garden at dusk, so we came inside, keeping six feet of distance between each other, in those pandemic days, but still riffing and clicking.
Barbara made salmon and guacamole, we served Dan crackers and chips and sorbet and tea for dessert. Dan turned out to be an authority on tea, something he’d picked up from Cindy. With a twinge, I thought of our dear departed golden doodle Sparks as I cleared away the salmon. Sparks had always gobbled down the remains of a salmon dinner. So there were some somber notes.
But we kept finding good subjects: What happened to Dan’s hometown of Gary, Indiana when the steel industry collapsed? What do philosophers do in their daily lives to build up their schools of thought? And can someone create art without intending to?
Dan quoted a native of Bali saying: “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.”
This prompted thoughts about whether art seems urgently important because of some kind of unsettling awareness that we’re not doing all we can. It was an evening both stimulating and sweet. The simple and the complex sat down together.
Not long after, I hosted a literary evening in my home, invited Dan as a guest, and was surprised and delighted when he asked to be a reader that evening. He shared a piece he’d written about Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German Jewish Marxist philosopher and activist. I found out that night that Dan had written entire plays and had them performed.
Later, he gave Barbara and me a copy of a cookbook his daughter-in-law Jenn had edited, and I semi-successfully fixed chickpea stew from one of the recipes.
Once I had Dan over for dinner when Barbara was out of town and I was feeling a bit lonely. He called that afternoon, in such an apologetic tone that I was sure he was canceling for dinner. But he only asked me to please not fix kale, because he hated kale. I was happy to oblige him. Later, he invited me over to his house for a sweet potato and fennel dinner which he expertly prepared while sharing stories and insights from his life.
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Last October, I suggested that Dan might host the next literary evening. He brightened at the thought but later confessed he’d “lost steam” in the last year and just handling the daily elements of life in the house was enough challenge for him.
The thing I most appreciate about Dan in retrospect was the degree of tact he showed about a walnut tree in my backyard that for years had dropped rotten walnuts on his driveway, on the windshield of parked cars in his driveway and sometimes on his back lawn. Barbara and I love trees, and we hate to cut them down.
Dan clearly wished we would have the tree taken down but never pressed the point or got angry about it. Eventually, when the walnut began shedding long branches, Barbara and I decided it was a safety hazard and reluctantly had the tree taken down.
To do the job, heavy equipment had to be moved over Dan’s property, so I checked in with Dan afterward, to make sure he felt the process had gone smoothly.
He said simply, “We won’t miss the clean-ups,” then added something I hadn’t thought of: “I hope no birds lost a favorite perch.”
In mid-December, Rich Levinson stopped by the house looking stricken, and told Barbara and me that Dan had received a tough medical diagnosis.
I e-mailed Dan, told him I’d shoveled his driveway and brought in his Globe asking if we could cook him a meal.
What can we do? I asked.
A few hours later, he replied only, “Thanks for the shoveling. Keep the paper. I’m super far behind.”
On December 23rd, he e-mailed that he was back at Newton Wellesley Hospital “but I hope not for long.”
On January 3rd of this year, Dan passed away from an aggressive cancer.
The last e-mail I recall getting from him came on December 27th.
It was characteristically brief and optimistic: “I’m home! Should have plenty of coverage. Thanks for everything.”