Ten Commandments for My New Neighbor

Living in a duplex, I go through neighbors like a family of cats goes through a five pound bag of litter that freshens with every step, and I have some friendly advice. If you want to make a go of it in this neighborhood, you’ll listen up and not staple this list to the hood of my car like the last guy did. If you want a reference from him, he is residing peacefully at Happy Acres Memorial Gardens. Feel free to use my name.


1. Old tents and ripped cushions in lawn furniture may be acceptably repaired with duct tape. Back windows in old Fords or open wounds on small children may not. Neither is it a substitute for nails and a willingness to locate a hammer when your mailbox has been detached from its post. A mailbox trussed to a wooden spike by thirty rounds of silver adhesive looking like a tin can with a toothache causes undue stress in an already unstable housing market.

2. John Deere makes a wide selection of lawn tractors. That six month old goat you’ve got tethered to a hubcap with three feet of heavy links like he’s the anchor man on a baby goat chain gang is not an acceptable substitute. Let’s send you out on a short leash to get the morning paper and see if you effect a change of heart.

3. Also, in the future please Just Say No to the idea of mowing the lawn clad only in your underwear. Indulge in a roomy pair of gym shorts and you’ll find yourself zipping up the neighborhood popularity poll before you know it.

4. A privacy fence is for, well, privacy. Please don’t launch your youngest child over the top of the fence like a punted football to find out what we’ve got cooking outside. We are not responsible for stray grill marks.

5. If you have a taste for loud music, please play something I know or can understand the words to. Having the tune to a rap song I don’t know stuck in my head will lead to my hanging about in your bushes trying to find out what words sound like “scratch my itch.”

6. A swimming pool is commonly used for swimming. I’m sure your new bass boat will skip over the lake like a flat stone, but trying out your new outboard motor in the above-ground will result in an appearance on Funniest Home Videos. Remember there’s nothing to impede your progress toward the slime pit across the street except that scraggly row of dandelions you call a flower garden.

7. Please don’t sneak over under cover of darkness to partake of the blueberries on my bushes. I’ll be glad to share. Just like you’ll be glad to share that mess of freshly caught, cleaned and chargrilled trout with me next summer. Also, I don’t mind if your kids climb the tree in my back yard to purloin fruit. But keep in mind the results from a morning filled with little green apples leads to an afternoon filled with personal aerobics of a stressful kind.

8. I understand if your Uncle Earl had an evening of social entertaining that leads to a hearty headache the next morning. But if any more of his “nieces” ring my doorbell at three in the morning clad in leopard-print hip boots and a leather halter top and ask to use my litter box, I’m calling Animal Control.

9. This is the South. We surpass just about everyone in the number of per capita lawn ornaments. But those plywood cutouts of Granny bending over to show her polka dot bloomers have been done to death. At least get something classy like one of those windmills that look like the roadrunner’s legs are going in a circle.

10. Close your curtains. The neighbors don’t need to know that the Jaws of Life was summoned to your home for the sole purpose of retrieving your wife from the Jacuzzi. Nor do we care how she plans to remove the dirty bathtub ring.

Attached you’ll find a request for samples from your garden for quality assurance purposes, a form absolving us of liability in cases of kitty prints found on the windshield of your Corvette, and a sterile baggie for DNA testing. Welcome to the neighborhood.

Out to Launch

I would rather let my teenaged sons select my spring wardrobe than go through a Halloween haunted house. I may be taking the risk of being seen next May in a stunning camo and chained wallet ensemble, but somehow I’d rather take that risk. It seems like raising two boys would have dulled my susceptibility to the undead wearing mismatched clothes and bearing chain saws long ago, but somehow a grown man chasing me like I’d recovered a fumble and making revving noises until the spit flies frightens me beyond consciousness. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived long enough to know just what grown men are capable of.

For instance, I know of a man who, with one ill-timed twirl of his office chair, ripped the pull-out drawer of his desk (which he had unfortunately forgotten to un-pull) from its moorings sending thousands of helpless paperclips, ballpoint pens, and TicTacs skittering to their deaths across the floor of his cubicle. Because the drawer had not acted properly according to function and stubbornly refused to recede into the desk upon contact with the chair, he was able to claim that the accident was not his own fault but was, in fact, a hardware problem. The scary part of the story? This man is an employee of the world’s largest defense contractor.

Another example, eerily personal in nature, is this. I have daily contact with, and often wash the underwear of, a man who once worked diligently to create a working tabletop model of a medieval-style trebuchet, for the sole purpose of launching toy farm animals across the kitchen at the dog. Sure, he said he was helping the kids with a school project, but to this day the Labrador looks for flying cows before he’ll set one paw on the linoleum. I couldn’t housebreak the poor animal without setting up training runs through plastic livestock, and he can’t see the movie Twister without going all white around the whiskers.

It is not news that there are men who favor bungee jumping as a form of self expression. Recently, I received a video by e-mail, a form of information transference which upholds the laws of truth, that revealed a victim, er volunteer, dangling by harness from a high horizontal wire. The fact that the scene took place in a large cow pasture and the, um, volunteer was also attached to a team of flannel-shirted engineers atop a John Deere lawn tractor by a long bungee cord gave me pause, especially when the tractor headed downfield at speeds normally associated with phrases such as “Mach 1” and “boom.” The fellow in the harness didn’t pause though, because when the ground crew let go of the tether, he hurtled through space like a cow pie meteor, completed a full somersault with a half twist and landed with gusto in a flourishing maple tree. After that, of course, everybody wanted a turn.

Any one of these guys might be the maniac in the Halloween haunted house you visit. If he’s wielding a chain saw, you can probably make it out alive. But if he’s after you with a bungee cord, you won’t see your family again until you’re starring in a You Tube video with “Fly Like an Eagle” playing in the background.

Puzzled

Since it was Saturday and I had no other tasks before me, unless you count coming up with creative excuses not to walk the dog or whipping out a check for the rent, I whiled away my time sharpening a pencil.

I didn’t realize at the time that pencil sharpening is an Extreme Sport boasting a difficulty on par with weasel wrestling or damp mopping with a frisky Labrador in the house. I simply wanted to solve the daily crossword. My pencil, the only one I could find without a clever pirate skull pencil topper that came free inside something that costs more per gallon than gasoline, was dull.

The problem began several years ago when we bought the children a pencil sharpener in answer to a popular excuse for not doing homework. My husband and I, believing we were no less intelligent a team than the pencil sharpener manufacturing squad, came to a unanimous decision that battery-powered pencil sharpeners lack sufficient power to take care of the number and quality of pencils that we intended to provide for our scholarly brood.

After comparison shopping among major brands and dealers, we procured a handsome electric pencil sharpener, red in color, imagining it would gnaw through a mere Ticonderoga like a menopausal chick through chocolate (names omitted to protect the chubby).

For the most part, Red sprawled aimlessly on the counter, holding down a stack of trading cards and some stray recipes I pretended I was going to try, although he once gave a half-hearted effort to sharpening a chopstick for Son One’s amusement. But today’s mission was vitally important. Since I live in the land of Y chromosomes who aspire to greatness, I’ve never finished a newspaper crossword alone. If I worked fast, I could complete the thing before the crowd got up to watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kick some shell.

Finding an open, accessible outlet in my house is rather like hunting for the last red M&M in the pack. Once upon a time they were in abundance. Now that they’ve gone the way of other endangered species (like pantyhose, the cents symbol on your keyboard, or a celebrity who's not expecting at least one infant), no matter how fervently you search through the tumbled pile of greens and browns, when you plunge down to the bottom of the bag you end up with a fingernail full of something brown and gooey.

So I began my search through the house swinging my pencil sharpener like Florence Nightingale with her lantern, only she was out to help people and all I wanted to do was solve the Jumble.

There’s an open outlet in the laundry room, but the calisthenics involved to reach it would necessitate hanging by my toes from the shelf over the dryer. I’ve lost a little muscle tone in my ankles over the years, probably from the bizarre habit of sitting in front of a computer for extended stretches of time in an attempt to earn grocery money. I could climb down the wall like a blue-tailed lizard, but I’m concerned about the integrity of my landing gear. One crash landing and I could meet my insurance deductible for the next five years.

I peered cautiously into the bathroom. The outlet there sports eerie octopus arms attached to the curling iron, the electric toothbrush, and the boys' John Deere-strength razor. I can almost understand the cord the goes to the amplifier for Son Two’s electric guitar, but you wouldn’t think a house full of teenage boys would require a crimper.

The kitchen outlet is in plain view, but unplugging the microwave and crock pot seems cruel and unfair after all they’ve done this summer to save me from turning on the oven.

Which gives me an idea. All I have to do is pull the stove out from the wall, edge the refrigerator over a bit, knock a few dozen greasy dust bunnies out of the way and skirt around the puddle of mystery goo. I pulled the plug, draining power from the evil appliance who’s main purpose is to encourage marathon sweating as I hover over fried chicken, corn puddings, and asparagus casseroles.

Looks like pizza delivery tonight.

Sharpening my pencil to a perfect point and breathing a sigh so big I could have sent the Santa Maria clean past America in one blow, I returned to the puzzle page and was delighted to find that I knew the answer to the first clue. As I lowered pencil to paper, the tip snapped off, digging a hole through two pages and my last nerve.

Now I know why they call it the breaking point.