My sleepy little residential neighborhood is occasionally the site of dramas.

Our building has four units. The building next door is a mirror image of ours, also with four units. Eighteen years ago, when I moved in, the buildings were owned by one family. About fourteen years ago the buildings were sold, separately. There are a couple of shared facilities: a driveway, a tiny parking lot that has fewer spaces than there are units. Each building has its own laundry room and small yards, which are shared, but only between the people in each respective building.

So we have eight households who live close together and have reasons to try to get along besides just happening to be living on the same street. And then, of course, there are other houses and small apartment buildings up and down the block.

There’s one neighbor in the next-door building who is drunk all the time. He’s been in that state for years, and he just doesn’t have many brain cells left. Since his significant other passed away (turns out they weren’t married, which is something we only learned after she died, and her family did everything in their power to keep him away from the funeral, et al), he’s been through a series of increasingly dysfunctional roommates. The latest one seems to be drunk even more often than he is.

When I see them, you’re never sure when one of them is going to be grumpy and snarling, or happy and gregarious. So I limit my interactions mostly to smiling and nodding.

Fairly late last night there was a knock on our door.

A couple of young guys moved into a downstairs unit in our building last week. Until last night, I had only met one of them. They had just witnessed a hit and run involving a car parked on the street in front of our buildings, and weren’t sure whose car was whose.

The weather was warm and muggy yesterday, so they had been standing outside with another neighbor, chatting in the cool air, when a van pulled into the driveway between our building and the building next door. The aforementioned new roommate of the drunk in the other building stumbled out, apparently even more extremely drunk than usual. The van backed up out of the driveway, slammed into a parked car, and then zoomed away.

By the time I had shoes on and was outside, the extremely drunk neighbor was insisting she didn’t know who had dropped her off, another neighbor was on the phone with police trying to describe the runaway car, while the neighbor who owned the damaged car was trying to figure out how bad said damage was.

After ascertaining that no one had been hurt, I wasn’t sure what help I could be. If police came to take a statement, since I had neither seen nor heard the crash, I figured me standing around outside would just add to the confusion.

And it was a little awkward listening to one of the owners of the damaged car trying to get the extremely drunk person to admit to remembering anything useful.

I should be out there dealing with some weeds and doing some pruning of the one rose bush that is going a bit bananas. Or at least take the trash out.

But I keep finding excuses to stay inside, because I anticipate awkward conversations or something.

Which is silly. Because the awkwardness isn’t even mine. I’m not even a witness. I’m barely a bystander.

But you feel bad for people who are in awkward situations. And you wish, somehow, that you could fix things.

It feels wrong to just say, “It’s nothing to do with me.” Because while the current situation doesn’t directly involve me, the ongoing difficulties of having the two clueless drunks living next to everyone—and the string of odd, annoying, and occasionally more serious issues that keep happening around them—are shared by all of us.

Even more surely than the shared driveway.

There’s some profound point in all of this, I’m sure. Something about unchosen communities and why we can’t go through life saying, “nothing to do with me.” And something about that weird spectrum with meddling in other people’s lives on one end and not caring what happens to them at the other, and how do we find an acceptable position in the middle.

If I think of it, I’ll let you know.