CURVE:Spirit of community lives on

Then there was Treb Heining, our neighborhood balloon man written up in these pages last week, who missed New Year's Eve at home because he was in New York, high above Times Square, casting confetti out over the celebrants gathered there to watch the ball drop on 2006. As always, Treb had a contingent of locals who journeyed to New York to help in the casting. My family got in on this neighborhood perk some years ago, stationed atop a theater marquee and serving as "confetti disposal engineers" — as Treb preferred to call us.

Already, one former neighborhood family has set up shop at the head of the line for next year's confetti shower, following the lead of this year's confetti engineers Ned and Sally Rose, who moved out of the neighborhood but not out of its reach or its heart. Then there were the communiqués about the four members of the Darling family, who were on a trip to Thailand when terrorist bombs hit Bangkok. The e-mails didn't quiet down until it was established and properly reported that the Darlings had moved out of Bangkok before the bombers struck.

We've lived in this neighborhood for 23 years, and it has always been this way. My peers have raised and sent out into the world from Santa Ana Heights a whole generation of kids who have now been supplanted by a new generation that seems to have picked up on the traditions already firmly in place. It says something about those traditions when kids who grew up here often return to reprise the celebrations they remember from childhood. The names and faces have changed, but not the devotion to the neighborhood. Or the sense of looking after our own.

We do a terrific job of that — especially for the lonely in our midst. And especially at Christmas time, when a knock on the door might well be a wagon load of black-eyed peas saying this is indeed a lucky place in which to live.