Of people from their lives, of Americans from one another, of all of us from places as they race to change. In his poem “Visible City,” Rickey Laurentiis wishes he could make all the cities within his city of New Orleans more visible. Larry Watson bemoans the loss of the Bismarck, North Dakota, that he called home once, where the well-to-do and the middle classes lived on the same block, and the cathedrals of accumulation one sees now circling the city were unthinkable. Chris Offutt bemoans such changes, too, but he isn’t about to become a spokesman for the working classes by selling his heritage back to well-to-do buyers in the form of essays on “trash food,” as one editor asks him to write.

What is required to make it in America often requires leaving home—and grappling with a new place. In her barbed and lovely essay on Chicago, Sandra Cisneros remembers how the city that raised her also trained her to leave it in order to survive, to become herself. A far greater threat to personhood lurks in wait for the women in Roxane Gay’s short story. Raised by an abusive out-of-work drunk, married to husbands who don’t pull their weight, they sense their time to escape is running out. Claire Vaye Watkins remembers the many houses and trailers she grew up in across the West, and how she and her sister kept eyes on each other as their mother spiraled close to giving up.

I hope there is a bandwidth of care that still exists in America. One where people don’t give a hand just because it suits them, but because it is the right thing to do—it is how we all get by. Annie Dillard recommends this to writers on days when they wonder what they are for. Whitney Terrell practiced this generosity with a next-door neighbor and realized what a complicated network of expectations he was entering. In her essay, Ann Patchett recalls a priest in Nashville who lived by this credo, and all the good work he did. And in Portland, Oregon, today, Karen Russell describes a city with a homeless problem so large, an epidemic of generosity among all its citizens might be the only way out.

It might sound trite—the notion that the solution to our problems in America lies between us, not above us, and not in the governments that have let us down. Perhaps, but all one has to do is get stuck overnight at an airport, as Julia Alvarez did on her way home to Vermont one night, to realize that the thin boundaries between people can easily be broken down by one shared experience. Alvarez watches as people of all colors and backgrounds help one another find places to sleep, blankets to wrap themselves in, food to eat. In America today we have come to view inequality as a problem that afflicts only the needy. What a mistake. For it is in sharing that we can alleviate a situation that pains us all.

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I do have one memory of Sacramento that came to mind not long after I left behind the man looking for the Meals on Wheels truck. Christmas 1986. In those years my father worked as director of a family service nonprofit that created drug and alcohol recovery programs, Meals on Wheels trucks for seniors, counseling for families who could not afford it otherwise. That year he decided it was a good idea to take us around south Sacramento giving out toys and turkeys to families who could not afford them. And so we piled into our station wagon with a trunk full of food and presents.

I was used to knocking on doors back then—I had a paper route, and every month I had to ride a few miles around my suburban neighborhood chasing down the $8.50 it cost for home delivery of the Sacramento Bee. Most people paid, no one ever invited me in, and a few people dodged me. That latter group made me wonder, Who doesn’t pay an eleven-year-old who has been riding to your doorstep at five-thirty every morning? And there were different sorts of houses, like the ones we visited that Christmas. The screen doors open even in winter. The dogs did not look particularly friendly. But the people were. That holiday as we drove from house to house we were invited in, welcomed, hugged, and even when people felt uncomfortable—one teenager our age ran off crying—we shared a few words. My father stood in living rooms and asked where people were from.

My parents never told me what this trip was supposed to mean. It was clear.