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Here's a funny memory that came to me while I was talking to Diana Dorn Jones, executive director of the United South Broadway Corporation, about the elderly and our neighborhoods. It concerned the old-fashioned "front-porch culture" many of us might recall from a few generations back.

If you do remember it, then surely you recall how important - and sometimes annoying - it was to have a constant set of eyes on the block.

I took my share of butt kickings from the parents back then, after they got the "Do you know what your son was up to today?" scoop from the self-appointed neighborhood elderly watchdog.

But here's the funny memory: That didn't happen in a typical urban city center.

It was in the suburbs in the mid-Õ60s, when nearly half the households in the area had an elderly occupant. The funny part was how these folks would walk nearly every day and kvetch on the corner.

Afterward, they would retire to their respective perches, some literally right on the lawn in front, and stay there.

Watching.

It was a riot. The visual of this old-style living in the middle of a quiet suburban streetscape cracks me up to this day.

Given some of the mayhem that can run virtually unchecked in our denser inner-core neighborhoods, maybe it's time to bring that idea back.

Dorn Jones agrees and has been working on formalizing a program for her area of South Broadway north to Huning Highlands and, with luck, citywide.

"Our experience is the elderly (who are) home all day are the best crime prevention," she said. "They see everyone and everybody."

Amen. The emotional imprints on my rear end prove it.

Dorn Jones makes a rather compelling point regarding the elderly and the status they've earned in a neighborhood.

"I consider it positive gate-keeping. These people are informal leadership in a neighborhood versus the formal leadership that's elected," she said.

That idea fascinates me. Perhaps it's a function of getting older, but it clears up one of the great mysteries of youth - that idea of "What gives you the right to watch over me?"

Well, they do in fact have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to be watching over us from their front porches.

Dorn Jones has been noodling with the idea of how to get the elderly re-stitched into the fabric of our neighborhoods, along with the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning.

Lauren Austin, a real estate salesperson working primarily in Huning Highlands, has an additional wrinkle on the notion.

Elderly residents "are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood, but more important to me is how we take care of them," she said.

"If they're not out there, how do you know if there might be something wrong and we need to check on them?"

So what happened? Why has the front-porch culture disappeared from our lives?

The obvious first answer is we stick our elders in nursing homes instead of spare bedrooms, but both Dorn Jones and Austin make the point that how we build homes today, with everything turned into a backyard culture, is part of the problem.

"Too often you pull into the garage, pull it closed, and we never see each other," Dorn Jones said.

So true.

Changing that goes well beyond crime prevention. It's about how we live and consider one another as neighbors and friends.

The benefits could be tremendous for older neighborhoods, where front porches are already in place. Many of those homes are occupied by the elderly. But we need to get them to feel safe enough to get outside.

"This is really grass-roots stuff that happens at the neighborhood level," Dorn Jones said. "It's a natural for older neighborhoods. We just have to provide the front porches and it just happens.

"If you don't tap into that, you never move your neighborhood forward."