It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

MONTHS AGO, when I agreed to write this article on the richness of living in an ethnically, racially, and economically diverse neighborhood, I thought it would be easy.

I knew what I wanted to say. And I'd said it often enough in speeches and in print: that a community like mine on the Far North Side of Chicago, with its mix of people and religions and languages and colors and modes of dress and ways of thinking--and ways of thinking about God--is a treasure.

I knew I wanted to write about how my neighborhood helps me see and experience the kaleidoscopic nature of human life, how it broadens my perspective. How it makes me a fuller person.

In many ways, it's a humbling experience. I was raised in Austin, a heavily Irish Catholic, all-white neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. It was midcentury then, a time of certainty--in the church and in the nation.

And there was a sense that we, the Irish Catholics of Austin, were God's chosen people. Our customs, our ways of praying, our celebrations, our ways of grieving--these, we felt, were somehow ordained by God. We were doing it right: We were living the right way, and everyone else--the Italians with their high emotions, the Protestants with their Bible-thumping ("They stole our saints for the names of their churches," the nuns taught us), the Negroes with their jungle rhythms, the Jews with their exotic customs (my brother once went into the only Jewish butcher shop near our neighborhood, asked for a pound of pork, and ran out the door)--everyone else was wrong.

It's a very narrow-minded worldview, of course. I can see that now. But, back then, it seemed to be the only way to live. And I can also see now some of the reasons behind it. The Irish, like other immigrant groups who had landed in Chicago, congregated together as a way of surviving in the strange new land called America. They protected each other's back. And it helped at the end of the workday to return to a home and neighborhood where the language, the faces, and even the smells of the food were reminiscent of the Old Country. (It was the same, I'm sure, for each ethnic group.) It was as if they were returning to Ireland, or a plot of Ireland that had somehow been magically transported to this new world. So much had changed when they had come over on the boat that they hung on for dear life to those things that hadn't changed, those things they could keep as they had been back home.

This was all well and good, to a point. Because it was exactly that mind-set that helped destroy Austin and tainted the lives of everyone who lived there.

Austin was a bastion for its people. We felt safe inside its boundaries. We feared everything outside its boundaries. We feared change. And, because of the Depression and World War II, change was something we hadn't had to face. For two decades, the map of Chicago had been essentially frozen. No one had moved. Everyone had stayed put.

But, then, with the war won, change came.

I remember, growing up in Austin, how we would look east down West End Avenue as if we could see the invasion that was heading our way. For generations, blacks in Chicago had been relegated by restrictive covenants in land deeds and by government-mandated segregation to two increasingly overcrowded ghettoes: the Black Belt on the South Side and a much smaller enclave just west of the Loop. Despite an influx of hundreds of thousands of rural Southern blacks who had come north for war-related work, the boundaries of these ghettoes had remained constant. They were filled to bursting.

But then a number of things happened: young white families, benefiting from the postwar boom, began settling not in their parents' old ethnic neighborhoods but in the new suburban developments out beyond the city limits.

This created a vacuum in those old neighborhoods--empty houses that needed new buyers and vacant apartments that needed new renters. There was a ready market for those homes and apartments: the blacks, many of them with middle-class and even upper-class incomes, who had been living on top of each other in the ghettoes.

When court rulings finally eliminated the restrictive covenants that had legally barred blacks from moving into many communities, it was as if a dam had burst. The migration west and south was like a huge wave that could be seen almost visibly moving down Chicago's streets. In fact, later--as a newspaper reporter studying this historic trend--I would map out the movement of this wave year by year and decade by decade across the city's map.

At St. Thomas Aquinas Church, our parish in Austin, the priests tried to prepare us for the changes that were coming. Integration, they said, was a good thing. God calls us to be open to all people. God wants us to get along.

But almost no one listened. We were too afraid. We were afraid that our homes--the largest single investment of our lives--would suddenly drop in value by a third or a half once blacks moved in. So, egged on by panic-peddlers, we sold off quickly, often at a loss, in what became a self-fulfilling cycle. With so many families leaving, the values of the homes did drop because there was a glut on the market.

Even more, the white people of Austin were afraid of blacks as the Other, as the embodiment of the unknown. For Austinites, blacks represented everything about the outside world, the world outside of the neighborhood, that was scary and strange and uncontrollable. Locked as we had been in our Irish Catholic customs, culture, and comfort, we had virtually no real experience with people who were different from us. There was us, and then there was the rest of the world. And now here was the rest of the world--in what, for us, was its scariest form--flooding in on us, drowning us, turning our worlds upside down. It's no wonder we ran.

THE PAIN WAS GREAT, OUR pain--the pain at losing our home place, at having to surrender the familiar street corners and front porches and two-fiats and bungalows and church pews and newsstands and parks and basketball courts and grocery stores where we had lived our lives. We were shorn of our memories. And we did it to ourselves, in fleeing, in fearing.

The pain was also great that we inflicted on the blacks who moved into Austin, by running from them, by treating them as lepers, by fearing them.

That same sort of emotionally overwhelming fear--blind, irrational, visceral--is not possible in the neighborhood where I now live with my wife and two children. This six- or seven-square-mile area along Chicago's northern lakefront encompasses three city communities: Rogers Park, Edgewater, and Uptown. And its ethnic, racial, and economic diversity is unique in Chicago.

While most Chicago communities are still rooted in a single ethnic or racial group--and are made up of people from a single, often very narrow economic stratum--my neighborhood is home to substantial numbers of blacks (African Americans and new immigrants from Africa), Asians (including, but not limited to, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chinese, Assyrians, Koreans, and East Indians), Hispanics (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and South and Central Americans), and whites (lifelong neighborhood residents as well as immigrants from elsewhere in the city, from the suburbs, from elsewhere in the nation and, most recently, from such European nations as Russia and Croatia).

Some of these people are well-to-do; others, middleclass; others, poor. Some are Catholic; some, Protestant; some, Jewish; some, Muslim; and some have no formal religion. Some are straight; some are gay. The class photos that my son and daughter bring home from school show a rainbow of faces of different tints, tones, colors, and hues--but all are children, and all are smiling.

Yet, my neighborhood is not paradise. And that's why I've found it so hard for so long to come to grips with this article. I wanted to tell about life here, but I didn't want to make it sound too good to be true. Because it's not all good. It isn't perfect. There are drawbacks to living in a diverse neighborhood.

Take crime, for example. Living in an economically diverse neighborhood means living with more crime. That's because poor people are more likely to turn to theft or robbery than someone with a better income. So I've had a camera stolen from my car, and my car stolen from in front of our house. We've had chairs, toys, and even a barbecue grill taken from our backyard. My wife has had her wallet snatched from her hands as she walked up the steps to the "L" train. And my son, when he was 9 or 10, had his new bicycle taken right away from him by three older boys as he and a friend were in a neighborhood alley looking at someone's backyard garden.

It's this last example that has really bothered me. Because, for more than a year afterwards, my son was leery about riding his bike anywhere except near our house. He didn't feel free to ride aimlessly around our neighborhood the way I had ridden aimlessly throughout Austin as a boy.

Similarly, my daughter was frightened by a grizzled, side-bent homeless man who came up to her and a friend unawares and asked for a handout. It's a shock she remembers when she sees other homeless people.

And it's not as if prejudice--racial or otherwise--disappears in a diverse neighborhood. Just north of us, there's a constant friction between Hispanic and African American teenagers, particularly along one of the community's main thoroughfares, Clark Street. And my wife and I nearly fell out of our chairs when, during a church-related small group meeting in our home, one of our Filipino neighbors asserted that she blamed some recent thefts on a local Mexican family because they were, well, Mexican.

Last summer, as many as a dozen boys, most of them black, ranging in age from 12 to 16, made a regular practice of playing a rough form of touch football in the alley behind our home. When a neighbor complained to police, the two white officers who responded overreacted, calling in a half dozen other squad cars and locking up Antoine, the quiet African American teen I often see walking his dog and say "hi" to. My wife, a social worker and psychotherapist, was worried enough for Antoine that she accompanied the boy's mother to the police station and helped get the situation resolved.

In one way, living in a diverse neighborhood can feed prejudice--because, if something bad happens, it could easily be someone of another nationality or race who's responsible. For example, the one older boy who actually took my son's bike out from under him was black. Given that, it might be somewhat reasonable for my son to fear older black boys.

But here's the real value of a diverse neighborhood: sure, my son had a bad experience with the black boy who took his bike. But he's had many more good experiences with his black classmates, as well as those who are Asian and Hispanic and white. In Austin, all blacks were mysteries to us because we never talked to one as a neighbor or friend. My son and my daughter don't have that problem.

A couple years ago, there was a great to-do in the NBA because Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused, for a game or two, to stand during the playing of the national anthem. It seemed to him a violation of his Muslim faith.

This was, of course, a topic of major interest to my basketball-addicted son and his similarly hooked friends, even though most of them didn't quite understand the issues involved. So, like most 10-year-olds, they turned it into a joke, making fun of Abdul-Rauf. At least, that's what they did until Branden, one of their classmates and probably the best player on their basketball team, told them to stop. By making jokes of Abdul-Rauf, Branden told them, they were making fun of the Muslim faith--and Branden himself was Muslim. The joking stopped.

Those priests back in Austin had told us that it was our Christian duty to accept the integration of the neighborhood. If they'd only known. Integration--diversity--isn't a duty to be borne. It's a treasure to be savored.

Yes, it's an imperfect treasure, but all treasures fall short in some way.

Because of our diverse neighborhood, my children are growing up without that dread of the stranger, that fear of the unknown--of the Other-that I and my sisters and brothers learned back in Austin. For us, different meant bad. For my children, it just means different.

And many times, for them (and for my wife and me), different opens whole other worlds, filled with fascinating customs, flavors, and sights.

For us, different means the taste of Thai food at our family's favorite neighborhood restaurant, and the spice of the Filipino cooking that my son and daughter learned to love at the home of their longtime baby-sitter, a woman who's like a grandmother to them.

For us, different is the traditional Jewish custom of sitting shiva--a tradition we took as our own two years ago when my mother died. She had donated her body to science, so there wasn't the usual Irish wake. Instead, friends and neighbors crowded our apartment for two nights of shiva, bringing food and condolences to ease the grieving.

For us, different is the usual--the sight of turbaned men leaving their street-corner mosque (a former Christian church) after early-morning prayers; the friendship of two gay men and their three adopted children; and the lessons that the Jewish father of one of my son's classmates teaches about Passover to the seventh-grade class of our local Catholic school.

In my grade-school class, there were four Patricks and four Marys. Among the classmates of my son and daughter are children named Ashish, Nader, Camille, Deon, Porasai (called T.J.), Deepali, Ricardo, and Valentine--as well as Colleen, Curtis, Caitlyn, Ashley, Bridget, and Grace.

My son's best friend is a Filipino boy named Pierre. Because of that friendship, our family was invited to the cotillion of Pierre's sister, Kate. Cotillions are something we Irish in Austin never did. We'd heard of them, and made fun of them, as parties for the rich. But here my family was, all duded up, sitting at a table at Kate's elaborate and elaborately formal coming-out party, a tradition that Pierre's family had brought with them from the Philippines.

It was clear that this was a cultural ritual with its own rules and expectations. There was even a formal dance-well-choreographed--that Kate and her court and her father, Louie, did midway through the party.

It was intriguing to watch, and breathtaking in its way. As the dance was about to begin, Louie, a middleaged manager at a Coca-Cola plant, stood facing Kate.

Then, all of a sudden, the music started and our jaws dropped as we saw Louie lift Kate up high above him as if he were a star of the Bolshoi Ballet and Kate the latest prima ballerina. No question, Louie had been instructed beforehand how to put his hands just so and lift up in a certain way; and Kate had been told how to help her father by bracing her hands on his shoulders and by arching her body, so that the movement came off without a hitch (or a broken back).

For a boy from the Irish ghetto of Austin, whose sense of culture through his first 20 years was corned beef and cabbage, and the Blarney Stone, and men in uncomfortable suits at evening wakes, it was a revelation.

It revealed another way of living, of being, it was rich with the stuff of humanity. It was a fresh glimpse into the vast panorama that is life.

It was enriching and freeing and broadening. And it was filled with grace.

It was a blessing.

By Patrick T. Reardon, a feature writer for the Chicago Tribune and author of Daily Meditations (With Scripture) for Busy Dads (ACTA Publications, 1995).