Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Won't you be my neighbor?

We’ve lived in our current house for seven years. We rarely talk to our neighbors and a return exchange of a friendly wave is almost always out of question. I still haven’t figured out the dynamics of our street. One thing I do know is that the couple who we bought our house from were really big liars. I know it was probably a stupid question to ask but when I asked “What are the neighbors like? Are they friendly people?” I was told what I expected or most likely wanted to hear: “The neighbors are really friendly and we do stuff together all the time.” I recommend against asking this question to the sellers of a home…..your best bet it to go to a few neighbors and ask them. You may come to find out that the owners of your potential new home are douche bags who will tell you whatever you want to hear to make a sale or your potential neighbors are a bunch of A-holes.

Our street is quite so I can’t complain about that aspect. I am just confused of how unfriendly people are. When we moved in to our house I ran across the street to a neighbor’s looking for a phone book. I knocked on the door and a short, round, little man opened the door, looked at me and said “What do you want?” I introduced myself. All I got was “Hold on a minute.” in return. He turned around and walked back into his house. A moment later a telephone book came flying my way. He said “Bring it back when you’re done.” and shut the door. So off I went. I got what I needed from the book and walked back to return it. I once again knocked on the door. I heard a yell from the house “Leave it on the front porch.” I dropped the book and walked home.  Since that day I have been able to get a few occasional waves from the guy and that was all up until this week.

I was mowing my lawn and had stopped to empty the grass catcher into a refuse bag. I had my earplugs in and couldn’t really hear anything. I bent over to unhook the bag and stood up. I turned my head and there was “phone book guy” standing next to me. He scared the crap out of me and I jumped a bit. He then started talking to me as if we were best friends. I was thoroughly confused at this point. I wasn’t sure what to say. So we shot the shit about sports for a while and I went back to mowing the lawn. So apparently one of the local rules on my street is that you can only talk to your neighbor every seven years.

A few weeks prior to this incident I was loading up some old stuff into my car to take to our storage unit. As I was carrying stuff out my neighbor directly across the street stopped me and asked “Are you moving?” I responded “No, just moving some stuff to storage, the house is full.” He looked at me and said “I’m glad you’re not moving, you are really good neighbors.” I thanked him and he immediately went inside. Yet another awkward conversation….. I haven’t talked to the guy for years, get a return wave twenty five percent of the time, and we’re good neighbors? I guess “good neighbor” equates to out of sight out of mind in his head. The saying about high fences making good neighbors must be true. Apparently in my neighborhood, being neighborly really means being un-neighborly.  Keep quiet, ignore each other, keep your yard kept, don’t acknowledge the existence of other neighbors, and leave me the hell alone. Mr. Rogers would hate it here. I could picture it now…..”Won’t you be my neighbor?”…….from what I’ve observed on my street I think he’d get a hardy “Go the hell away and leave me alone!” in return.