Freakin' Neighbors Being All Friendly And Shit

Yesterday it was everybody, young, old, and canine, and they were all on my sidewalk wanting to chat, and letting themselves into my garden and being friendly and casual and nice.  Neighborhood Crackhead, his dog Chica and I just hung out on the grass for awhile that afternoon and listened to music together and played with the dog, and that was nice.  We're friends now.  Casual and nice.

The four little (horsemen of the apocalypse) boys who must know about every plant in sight were back and forth all day long chatting about what, I have very little idea, because they start sentences in the middle of a thought and aren't real clear on things, and talk about video games a lot.  I nod and smile.  And shoo the littlest guy out of my yard multiple times a day.

The kid next door had his girlfriend over.  You can tell because his dog gets all bent out of shape and barks nonstop until they're...done...and she leaves, slick as hell, ten minutes before Dad gets home.  He has that dog on a leash and out the door he goes, nice, responsible older brother, as dad loads in stuff from his car, and the Biker and I just look at each other and snerk a bit.  Kid's got it down to a science.  That, and when someone lives literally five feet away from you, you get to learn their comings and goings, as it were.

Pet Teenager came over and insisted on helping me weed.  She does a good job and she's a nice, funny kid, and we did some weeding.  And then she began to decompensate.

Pet Teenager has bipolar disorder.  As the minutes passed, she slid into a manic episode.

Now I've had a few of them.  Hell, my daughter spends half her life that way.  So I didn't get too alarmed when she told me; I'd already guessed. And since she's a happy hyper, she said some incredibly goofy stuff that had us laughing so hard we were lying on the grass in hysterics.   Finally she got to a point where she needed to go home, so I gently kept her on track, and she made it home OK.  I gotta say, she weeded the holy hell out of my garden.  It looks downright professional out there.

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Same thing happened today.  It was Mothers' Day here, and I hung out and we barbecued some hamburgers and it was nice. Everyone was out walking around, riding bikes, razor scooters, skateboards; me, I kind of sidled around the yard and avoided contact, because sometimes you just want to hang out and not chat.

It occurred to me then that I have friends in town.

I was really, really careful to stay on distant but friendly terms with people for years, because this is a small place.  But time and carelessness on my part has lead to me knowing peoples' names and stuff, and now here I am, barely civilized, only marginally social, and I have friends.  Just casual neighborhood friends.

Shit, my parents didn't even have friends in our neighborhood.  My grandmother lived right next door, there were uncles and cousins living nearby, and those were the people we hung out with mostly; that and a few friends from the shipyards where my dad worked who were bikers.  One was a Bandito and the other guy was a lone wolf who rode with the Hells Angels - both of them super good guys and really nice to me.  But my parents never did any socializing close to home, and given the fact that we were the weird family on the street, that was probably for the best. (They were bickerers, and it was constant; and sometimes the volume was such that as soon as I turned onto our street I could hear them.  Clearly.  And they used high, mocking tones of voice and exaggerated sarcasm that really made the whole sideshow complete, man.)  Some days I'd just ride on past and go hit one of my friends houses and call home to ask if I could stay for dinner.  Thank God we had a very nice house and yard.  I mean THANK GOD for that.  You could get away with a lot of shit as long as you kept your property up.  

We had a neighbor who was in the National Guard, and when he got going, us kids would stop and just stare at his house.  The man was a sergeant who trained the new recruits and boy, he kept the goddamn troops in line, man.  His wife and three daughters were scared to death of this asshole - but he kept his yard up.  Gorgeously landscaped.  Pass!

Not so with one of the guys who lived a couple of houses away.  Didn't mow his yard, let the place get crappy looking, had a broken down car parked at the curb - dude had the police at his house about twice a month.  And it was just yelling and stuff, no gunfire or anything, but he let the place go to hell and he was judged by all the middle managers and bank tellers and school teachers and legal secretaries in our 'hood for that. Go ahead and scream obscenities at the top of your lungs, fine, but MOW YOUR DAMN LAWN YOU ANIMAL.

It's interesting.  I remember when I was a kid you'd ride your bike around and it was not at all uncommon to hear people arguing.  The last time I heard someone yelling here, it was our freaky neighbors who were animal hoarders and were evicted and the house had to be burned down because it was a biohazard.  The one sister used to get pissed off at the pear tree in their back yard around 11:00 at night and scream incoherently at it for awhile.  That's been eight or nine years ago now.  The house is gone, the people are gone, the pear tree is gone.  

It seemed like a nice tree to me.  I don't know what her problem was with the thing.  But man, that tree  used to piss her off something fierce.  She had a whole fuck of a lot to say to that tree, and it was very, very loud, and went on until she was just screaming hoarsely at it, bellowing and making loud animal noises.  

That got old pretty quick.  Yeah, I called the police. There's limits.  Howling at a pear tree at 11 p.m. is a limit that I had and I thought it was pretty reasonable.  No regrets.