Please Won't you be my Neighbor?

When you live in California you don't really get to know your neighbors. You might wave at them while you are building the eight foot fence that is going to separate your yard from theirs and hopefully keep those stray baseballs from sailing onto your property. There are exceptions but I think knowing your neighbors is a Midwestern thing. Maybe you just don't need your neighbors in California like you need them here. When you are snowed in your neighbor might end up being the only contact you have with another person.

I grew up in a small town; if you weren't related to everyone, you at least knew them in some capacity. Way back then, half the houses on the block were family. Time passed and that changed until only a few strongholds were left. We never met the people who moved into those vacated houses. We just glared at them from afar and thought "That was the house my grandmother grew up in, it survived the flood of 1928 and you are defiling it with that Oakland Raiders flag." Slowly we forgot which houses were which and went about our lives.

David and I never really met our neighbors in the apartment complex. We waved or made polite conversation in the parking lot. We were the only ones on our floor so there really wasn't anyone to get to know. People who live in apartments are generally people on the move. In the seven months I lived there, out of the twelve apartments in our building, only half were occupied when we moved out. I knew when we moved into a house we would have to talk to our neighbors. Of course, I fretted about this. This was uncharted territory and required etiquette skills I knew I didn't possess. Or did I? Could I be neighborly? Could I learn to extend an olive branch if not at least a cup of olive oil if asked? David and I got lucky. The day we signed the lease the previous tenant/landlord walked us over and introduced us to the neighbors. David was sick that day and we were on our way to run errands so we were only introduced to one set. Did the landlord want to introduce us to the other set? I worried about our hasty departure. What if we never had the oppurtunity to introduce ourselves again? How do you know when your neighbors want to talk and be social and when they don't? I was nearly hyperventilating as David, between sneezes, growled at me.

Our neighbors, the set we were introduced to at least, seem like nice people. We greet them when we happen to be out in the driveway at the same time and have had a few chats. I hope they think David and I are nice too, but really, I fear we are weird in their eyes. They know we are from California and around here that means automatically strange. Maybe they don't think David is weird but let's be honest, David is as normal as apple pie on the 4th of July. He wears jeans and t-shirts, has a job in a warehouse and drives a car and has a normal name. I am unemployed and I don't drive. I have an unpronounceable name, I wear my hair in Princess Leia buns and big, Hollywood sunglasses in the backyard while I read or watch David rake leaves. God forbid, I pick up a rake and even attempt yard work. Bugs fly near me and I run screaming, arms flailing until I realize they are just ladybugs. I pick my way across the lawn because I think the crickets are going to bite me.

They must think we are crazy. We own two cars, but were only in possession of one when we moved in. The extra car was on loan to a co-worker of David's. The car broke down and we had it towed to our house to get it off the co-workers hands. The car was towed with his kid's car seats in the back. I wondered what the neighbors must have thought. Here we were telling them we had no kids and suddenly a car with not one, but two, kid's car seats appears out of nowhere. Another time David and I returned from a late night shopping trip and the neighbor happened to be in the driveway, which we share. David owns a board game called Friedrich.

Friedrich had been hanging out in the trunk of David's car so he wouldn't forget to take it to his board game buddy's house. As we were removing our shopping bags, I loudly asked David, "Does Friedrich stay in the trunk?". I just about died of embarrassment and quickly prayed "Dear Lord, please don't let the neighbors think we have a body in the trunk of our car. You see Lord, I'm really new to this whole neighbor thing and I really want to make a good impression and I must already seem like a neurotic California girl when I'm really not. Okay, so maybe I have a touch of OCD and hysteria but really doesn't everyone? Thanks for listening." It seems I have a long way to go with this whole learning how to be a neighbor.