Tag Archives: neighbors

I don’t mean to be a grouch

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copyright 2014 Gene Breshears
These things were piled up in front of the mailbox on our building during the moving process… and left there.
Some neighbors moved out. They lived in the building next door. For many years they patiently enduring living right above Drunk and Drunker, who I’ve written about many times before. Unlike Drunk and Drunker, they were always very nice people: fun to talk to, always sweet & friendly, always helpful, et cetera. So let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Friendly. Mr. and Mrs. Friendly have lived there long enough that we’ve watched their daughter go from enthusiastic grammar school kid, to tween rebel, to sullen teen-ager with sketchy boyfriend.

Mrs Friendly was the neighbor who so very patiently worked with Mr Drunk when he was facing eviction to find a new place to live. Mrs Friendly was also the person who, when Mr Drunk’s relatives were moving him out and their truck drove over one of my flower beds, swept up the smashed decorative light before coming to knock on our door and tell us what happened. Mrs Friendly is the person who, more than a year since Michael and I got married, and a year-and-a-half since voters approved marriage equality in our state, gets teary-eyed when she tells me how very happy she is that we were able to get legally married.

So we were very sad a few weeks ago, while carrying cardboard out to the recycle, when Mrs. Friendly asked if she could have the boxes. Because they were moving out and needed to pack everything up by the end of the month.

Michael and I were miserable sick last week—right at the time that Mr and Mrs Friendly were doing their big move out. I was feeling a little guilty that we didn’t help with the physical move. Though I also figured that keeping our germs to ourselves was probably best. And the one time I actually saw moving going on they had a bunch of people helping. That’s the other thing, so far as I can tell, they did the bulk of their loading of stuff into a truck while I was away at work.

The thing I’ve been grumpy about is the left overs. Such as the pile in the picture at the beginning of this post. Those things were piled up in front of the mailbox on our building (remember, these neighbors don’t live in our building, they live in the building next door) when I got home from work one night. And since over on their building there were piles and piles of furniture and boxes, but no signs of any people at all, I presumed that they had left with a truck full of things and were unloading at the other location. Because our mailbox set is near the shared driveway, I figured those were just things that wouldn’t fit on the truck, and they meant to get them on the next trip.

The pile hasn’t moved for over a week.

There’s a bunch of other things (more ceramic planters with plants in them, a weird shaped metal chair, lots of cardboard boxes) still piled up over on the walkway in front of their apartment. I have since seen one of the owners of that building carrying cleaning supplies into the place. I hope that Mr and Mrs Friendly had a conversation with their landlord about the random left behind items over there.

I realize that the stuff left over by our place could be things that our landlady or one of our neighbors in our building agreed to take care of, and they just haven’t been moved. I can certainly imagine the conversation.

Mrs Friendly: “I have no idea where I’m going to put that in the new place!”

Neighbor1: “I thinks it’s beautiful!”

Mrs Friendly: “Do you want it?”

Neighor1: *looks toward her boyfriend who is in the middle of helping Mr Friendly lift heavy piece of furniture into truck* “What do you think? This could go in the corner of the living room.”

Boyfriend: *finishes pushing piece of furniture into truck* “Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess we could do that…”

And slowly a pile accumulates. By the end of the day, everyone’s too tired to deal with it.

I haven’t actually run into anybody to ask.

And I’m kind of glad, because I’m afraid my annoyance will come through and I’ll sound like an old, unhelpful grouch.

On the other hand, feeling grouchy about that motivated me the other night to trim back my roses. Since spring began, they’ve shot a bunch of branches into the porch and walkway. Some branches were getting out into the driveway. If it was annoying me to have to dodge the branches with big thorns, they must be driving some neighbors well past annoyance.

I completely filled up the yard waste bin with branches chopped from my two roses. Now no one has to dodge them, and I will feel less like I’m hurling stones from inside a glass house if I see a neighbor and ask about the pile of things.

Update: Of course, when I come home from work at the end of the day that this posts, the pile is gone.

Sometimes I hate being right

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I’ve written a few times about the troublesome, perpetually drunk neighbors whose lease was not renewed. They were supposed to be moved out by midnight Saturday. I had predicted, back in July, when we found out they had to leave, that they wouldn’t make it out in time…

Continue reading Sometimes I hate being right →

No winners at all

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I’ve written once or twice about a particular neighbor in the apartment building next door…

Continue reading No winners at all →

Is that your car?

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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.

Everyone needs a hobby, but…

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When I first moved into this neighborhood, 17 years ago, there was the shell of an Alfa Romeo on blocks in the driveway of a house down the block. It was missing at least one door, parts of the body were rusted out, that sort of thing. Over the years, I have watched it slowly be reconstructed. It’s kind of cool to see. I’ve even seen the owner driving it up the street once. In fact, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the owner’s face.

But it hasn’t all been cool.

His driveway slopes steeply down to the basement garage. At the other end it slopes down from the sidewalk to the street. So the only flat spot he has to work on the car is the sidewalk itself. And because he has thorny bushes on his property, and there’s a low sprawling cheery tree on the planting strip, when he has left it parked on the sidewalk (sometimes for days at a time) walking around it isn’t trivial.

Since every morning I have to walk that way to get to the bus, then back again after work, it was a bit annoying.

I sympathise. He has this (potentially) nice car he’s trying to restore, but the sidewalk is a public right of way. Technically, it’s a ticketable offense to block the sidewalk. Heck, a neighbor on the next block was cited for the lower tree branches that blocked the sidewalk there at about my chin level and up (and since I’m shorter than average, that meant everyone but small children had to crouch or duck to walk along that part of the sidewalk.

Most of the time the car is parked on the little bit that slopes from the sidewalk to the street. It doesn’t quite fit. The tail end of the car sticks out into the sidewalk, but you can walk through all right.

Some years go I remember a couple of days when not only was the car blocking the sidewalk, but a big tarp covered with car parts was spread out along the sidewalk. There have been numerous times when it was parked just off the sidewalk but various electrical cords and/or hoses were strung up from the garage to the car. Again, something I can step over, but a bit of a barrier to people pushing a stroller or a cart. And a trip hazard for anyone.

A few months ago we came home one night and found that the car had rolled into the middle of the narrow atreet, completely blocking it. We and the car behind us had to back up and go around the block. While I was unloading our car, once we got home, Michael walked down to knock on the owner’s door and help push the car back into the driveway.

Then one morning this week, just as I was about to get into the shower, I hear a horn start blaring. It wasn’t a “beep-beep-beep” of an alarm or someone pressing their “where did I park it” button. It just blared steadily.

After a minute of it going, I pulled my sweats back on and stepped outside. A couple other neighbors were just coming out. Of course, I’d been in a hurry, so I didn’t have shoes nor had I grabbed my glasses. I hadn’t heard a thud or crash before it started, but I was half expecting to see some kind of accident down the road. I couldn’t see anything.

A neighbor with a two-year-old in her arms said, “I can’t see any obvious cause. It’s like in a movie, someone just slumped over, head hitting the wheel?”

I went back inside for shoes and my glasses, then walked down the street.

Of course it was the Alfa Romeo. No one was in it. It was just sitting there, blaring.

I knocked on the door of the owner’s house. After a minute, an annoyed voice asked through the door. “What do you want?”

“Is this your car out here blaring?”

“I don’t know! Is it my car?”

I stopped myself from saying something crude. “I don’t know! It’s in front of your house!”

“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

One of the neighbors who lives further away than I did had stumbled out in a robe and slippers. It wasn’t that early in the morning (I go in a little later and work into the early evening, myself). The blaring was loud enough to wake up someone at the other end of the block. And I didn’t pound on the door. I just knocked normally. I was trying really hard not to be Angry Man, so I was careful to just knock.

Since he heard the knocking, there was no way that he hadn’t been able to hear his own car, right under his window, blaring its horn for four or five minutes. What the heck did he mean, sarcastically asking “I don’t know! Is it my car?”

Even now, I still have only seen his face that one time he drove the car up the street while I was weeding our lawn. The only reason I even looked up from the weeding was because the car was coughing and sputtering and sounding like the engine was going to either explode or die any minute. It lurched up the block and out of sight. Minutes later the sound fading as he kept going somewhere in it. I’ve seen his legs sticking out from under the car while he’s working on it. I’ve seen his silhouette at night coming out to deal with the car. So I don’t know him.

All I know is he’s been working on this car for nearly two decades, he’s only gotten it into barely working order briefly a few years ago. He’s had a string of cheap cars that look like junkyard rejects parked at the curb in front of his house (and occasionally in the driveway behind the Alfa). His yard is always overgrown. And he blocks the sidewalk with rather tiresome frequency.

I don’t want to tell him how to live his life. But I really, really, really wish he’d pick a different hobby.