A wonderful day in the neighborhood

I realized the other day that I don’t know much about my neighbors.

I know some superficial things about them. I know, for example, that the people on the corner still think it’s Christmas-time, as all of their decorations are up. I know that the people next to them must have mental problems, because they own six Great Danes, and keep them in their house.

But I hardly know anybody’s name. I confine my interactions with most of my neighbors to a friendly wave, an occasional “How you doing?” and a dirty look when I suspect it was their dog who crapped in my yard.

When I was growing up, I knew everybody in my neighborhood. I knew to stay out of the crazy lady’s yard three houses up, because she would come out front and cuss at you. I knew never to eat anything prepared in the house across the street, because my mama said “those people are nasty.” I knew which dogs were friendly and which ones would bite.

There was a family across the street and one house up, and the man and woman would get into unbelievable screaming matches. You could hear them from 100 yards away. Then the next time you’d see them, they’d be all lovey-dovey, laughing and playing with each other. It’s a fine line, I reckon.

There was the redneck family up the road with the slutty teen-aged daughter who wore denim cut-offs that were so short she could have gotten a colonoscopy without ever taking them off. I found a lot of excuses to walk by their house when she was outside.

My next-door neighbor’s name was Mike, and his dad was very strict. He wouldn’t even let his kids listen to rock-and-roll in his house. One day, Mike snuck me into his dad’s bedroom and showed me a stack of Playboy magazines about 5 feet high, dating back to the 1950’s. I looked at some pictures of Miss September 1976 and thought, man, this beats the hell out of Ted Nugent any day.

Now, I don’t know much at all about my neighbors. The guy who lives on one side of me is named Tommy. That’s all I know. He and I have talked quite a bit, but almost exclusively about our lawns. If I ever go on a multi-state crime spree, the TV newspeople will come interview Tommy about me and he’ll say, “Well, he was quiet, kind of kept to himself. He knew a lot about weeds. I never saw this coming.”

I don’t know the name of the guy who lives on the other side of me, or even what he looks like. I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup, even though he’s lived there at least two years with his wife and small child. I think he has some form of agoraphobia, as he comes outside in the daytime less often than Barnabas Collins.

There’s a guy across the street that I’m pretty close with. We talk all the time about all sorts of things – football, baseball, golf, weeds. He’s lived there for about eight years, and up until the past two years, I called him by the wrong name, and he never corrected me.

For the life of me, I thought his name was Clay. And that’s what I called him. One day my wife ran into his wife in the grocery store, and his wife kept referring to someone named “Thad.” She finally asked her if Thad is her husband’s name, and the woman (I don’t know her name, either) said yes, it is.

I have no idea why I started calling him Clay. It doesn’t even sound like Thad. At least it has the same number of letters.

Maybe I’ll make an effort to be a better neighbor. I can go around and introduce myself, exchange phone numbers, invite them over some time, and offer to help dismantle the manger display.