It exposes you to two streets of neighbors, which means they’ve got you coming and going.
Two: The way you can tell good neighbors from bad is simple — the bad ones make your problems worse.
As it happens, my most persistent neighbor problem is from the side street, not the one our house faces.
It involves a guy I’ve had issues with since he and his wife moved in catty-corner from my backyard in the house once inhabited by an older couple. Not that it’s important, but the new couple both tend to dress in dark clothes and sport tattoos.
There’s the little stuff, like the parking problems that occur during two particular parties they throw ever year – parties to which people bring packages carefully wrapped so you can’t see what’s inside and smile my way as they carry them in.
But the really annoying issues crop up at this time of year. And, true to form, they flared up again last week.
He was working in his front yard making a racket with some lawn equipment when I decided it was time to bring things to a head.
I called out his name a couple of times, then did it louder.
No response whatsoever, even when I moved closer and raised my voice.
Then it dawned on me. He had earbuds on and couldn’t hear a thing. The guy was lost in his own world.
So I had to wait to confront him until he finished and rolled up to the corner stop sign in his big pickup truck, which is black, of course, to go with his clothing.
But by that time, I was steamed.
Because of the clean-up he’d been doing, my yard looked worse, something that, down the road, could decrease my property value. The mess stretched all along the side of our house opposite cattycorner from his, past our driveway, extending to the corner.
It’s true he hadn’t actually put any of the stuff there. Most of it had fallen out of a blossoming tulip tree on our curb lawn. But the mess that been bothering me before he put his earbuds on and seemed worse after he was done, which clearly marked him as a bad neighbor.
It was because of him that I had to get out my own push broom and clean up along the curbs like he had. Of course, once the curbs were clean, the sidewalk looked bad. And once my sidewalk was clean, the driveway looked bad.
Nor was sweeping the only work. Once I’d swept all that mess into five piles, somebody had to drag out the big plastic garbage can and the snow shovel to get the clippings in the can.
Not him, of course. No, no, no. It was me.
I was in the midst of that final step when his black pickup rolled to a stop in the middle of the street.
I was ready to let him have it when he acted all friendly. I fended that off by saying I noticed he looked tired.
It turns out he’s been spending long hours at work, including required Saturday shifts. It’s been going on for a while and will for a bit longer.
Well, too bad for him, I say.
It’s not my fault that he’s trying to do the good thing at work and has to mow, weed whack and sweep up after he gets home. Nor, when it comes to it, is it my fault that he and his wife spend so much of their energy looking after the children whose safety seats were visible through the rolled down window.
And speaking of the kids, I decided right then to ask whether all the dust he’d stirred up cleaning up in front of his house that had ruined my afternoon had anything to do with those annual parties I mentioned.
No. The kids’ birthdays are still coming up.
My anger was beginning to slacken a bit, and in a weak moment, I went so far as to commiserate with him about the work he’d had to do that day at the shop, then in the yard, when he stabbed me in the back and twisted the blade.
Get this: He told me to my face he was glad he didn’t have a corner lot – a lot of the sort I’d just had to clean up because of him.
“Oh, you had to go there, didn’t you?” I told him.
In the end, he denied all responsibility for making my problem worse, saying the real culprit was the woman who lives next door to him and across the street from me.
I respect a person who throws a neighbor under the bus, or pickup, as it may be. And while I’m not totally letting him off the hook, I have to admit, he does have a point.
She may be worse than him.
Despite being a single mother and having gone back to school to change careers while faithfully running those two boys of hers to all their games in various seasons, she manages to keep her place up so well that my poor, overworked neighbor with the black pickup truck feels bad and has to clean up his lot.
That, of course, puts the pressure on me to do mine.
And the pressure is greater because, she has the corner lot directly across the street from me, meaning that when it looks all spiffy, mine looks bad, and that property value issue begins to make my head throb.
The whole thing’s totally unfair because she gets help from her father and mother, who, even though they don’t have any tattoos and tend not to wear dark clothing, seem as unthinkingly devoted to her and her kids as my earbud neighbor and his wife are to theirs.
Bottom line? I’m stuck.
And at some point, when these kinds of neighbor problems go on year after year, the only alternative is to move. I know every time they clean up their places that’s what they want me to do.
But I see through that.
The amount of work involved in moving is more than the amount they’re causing me now, so I’m not going to give in.
Which brings us to Number 3: You can never let your neighbors know what you’re really thinking.
So I’ve started smiling and acting all nice to the people who bring packages to the birthday parties. I’ve taken to saying hello when the same kids and parents return for rounds at Halloween. I’m acting all friendly when grandpa and grandma come around to help. And when the various kids knock on the door selling stuff to underwrite their activities, I buy it.
To keep them in the dark, I’ve basically started treating them like they’re good neighbors. I plan to keep it up until they move.
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