Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Okay, so my backdoor neighbor may be raising chickens. I’m not sure how legal that is in my city, but he doesn’t exactly seem like the law-abiding type.

He usually shows up at my front door every now and then, and if I don’t answer, he will call me and ask me to hang out. Along with the chickens, he kept a broken boat in his backyard. He also parks his truck on the side of this house on the grass; he has a driveway. You've got to wonder what’s going on inside that house.

I mean, he seems nice enough, but one night he showed up at the front door when my mom was home alone. This is a woman who might not open the front door to the police if they were banging on it; they might have to break down the door to get into this house. However, for some unknown reason, she opened the door when this dude showed up because she recognized him. Apparently, he was so drunk that my mom could smell the liquor on his breath and he was sluring his words. He asked where I was and if we wanted to eat some barbecue stuff he was making.

Of course, my mom told him I was away for a few minutes so he wouldn’t think she was alone. She called me in a frenzy, telling me how afraid she was. Despite all this, I considered inviting him to my 50th birthday party. My friends unanimously told me that I was talking crazy and there was no way I was inviting him. Honestly, I felt kind of bad because I knew he would see that I was having a party, and I didn’t invite him. But most likely, he would have gotten drunk and stayed until three in the morning.

Anyways I have a few interesting neighbors. There’s the lady next door who is a real trip. She put up a little fence on the side of her house because she was afraid our lawn guy was going to fall off the small hill onto her driveway. If she didn’t nag me so much, I would understand that she just didn’t want to see a dead body on her property. 

Then there was a tree on our property that she was afraid was going to fall onto her house. Okay, so this may or may not have been true, but still, the nagging. She would literally stop my friends and ask them to give me a message when they came over. We finally cut down the tree.  

One day, we had a guy trim our bushes. He was extremely cheap. To be fair, he looked like he stepped right out of Duck Dynasty; he had long hair, a long beard, and he had a huge belly. He did not wear a shirt. The woman next door saw him and literally called us to say there was a trespasser in our yard. When we told her we hired him, she just sighed and hung up. 

Then, of course, there is the homeowners association.

Image courtesy of Nicole Honeywill via Scopio

When we first moved into this house, thirty years ago, my dad had a wooden covering over some electrical equipment on the side of the house. The subdivision association made us dismantle the covering; we had to actually hire someone to do that. My dad was trying to hide something ugly; I’m not sure what policy that violates. The only good thing that came out of it was that my dad hired this hot guy from my high school to destroy the thing.   

So the association is annoying. I can’t tell you how many times they have threatened us with citations about weeds on our driveway or the bushes being too out of control. Then, literally two days after my dad’s funeral, I didn’t get the mail for like a week and found another citation from them about the bushes.

I wrote this very intense email telling them that my father had just died, and I didn’t get the mail, and considering that they only gave us like five days to fix it, there was no way I could have done it on time. The woman felt horrible and gave me a very profuse apology and told me to take my time. Oh, believe me, I took my time. Two months later, I hired someone to trim the bushes, and it wasn’t Mr. Duck Dynasty; lucky for the chick next door, he was missing in action.

Then there are the people who live across the street from us. My mom was so excited when they moved in because they are Indian and Sikh like us. However, my mother made many attempts to socialize with them, and they had nothing to do with it. Once, I ran into the lady of the house, and she asked me if my parents were ‘that elderly couple.’ I told my dad that she said that, and he was like, “Who is elderly?” My eighty-year-old father said that. 

Anyways they have huge parties that require valet parking and loud music. They have never invited us…how rude! I mean, we don’t know them at all. But they are Indian and Sikh! We are a minority; we need to stick together! 

Anyway, who cares? We actually have a nice Chinese family that moved in on the other side of us recently. They are actually friendly and came and introduced themselves and wave at us when we go outside. Silver linings. I mean, the truth is, am I a good neighbor? I don’t know, I remember Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood when I was a kid, he told us, "There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”

When I was a little kid, we lived in a different neighborhood where all the neighbors knew each other and all the kids played together. It was a lot of fun and felt like a big family. I’m Facebook friends with a couple of those friends from that old neighborhood, and still look fondly back at my childhood playing in the neighborhood.

In America, it is very common for people not to really interact with their neighbors. This is not true in some other countries, like India. In some ways, there is a lack of community in the U.S. Although I have friends in other neighborhoods who are very friendly with their neighbors. I guess it just depends. I, for one, wave at people when they are walking by my house and try to greet anyone I come in contact with. I have enough friends outside of this neighborhood that I’m not really upset by the fact that there is little community in my subdivision.

But sometimes I just want to play outside and wish I could hang out with a whole bunch of neighborhood kids.

nina

Our Podcast 2 Curries and a Ranch is live! Here’s a clip:

Check out the episode here: Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1874627207

The first Episode is about Indians in an Arctic Freeze: Ironically, the two Indian women who are not genetically designed to weather freezing temperatures are enduring the Polar Vortex, while the white guy hangs out comfortably in California sunshine. Where is the justice in that?