Anyone raised in a Christian household knows that the first step to becoming a neighbor is to find someone beat up on the side of the road. The next step is to return on two separate occasions dressed up as members of your least favorite nationalities and then finally to come back and help him while dressed as a Christian (or in other words, non-descript attire such as a polo shirt and kaki pants).
I have the suspicion, however, that very few of our neighbors are aware of these heart-warming all-American traditions. In reality, the word neighbor has about as clear cut of a definition as the word lover does in New Mexico. (There is nothing particularly scandelous about New Mexico, but in my experience the word 'lover' never has a clear cut definition.)
In the following scene, a forty-something black man walks into the Fatalistic Farmer and actually wanders around until he finds someone to introduce himself to. For those of you who could be unnerved by this scene, I’d like you to pretend that instead of an adult who has managed to live in the world for forty years without learning the simple concept of of trespassing, this character is a very small child who is looking forward to Halloween. Because unlike forty-year olds, children have an excuse not to have any sense of what is, say, socially insane.
I was cutting up mushrooms in the kitchen when he appeared at my side.
I was wearing an apron over a sundress and flip flops, and he was, well, black. I am a white college student. My evolutionary fight-and-flight response: You had me at What up.
“Can I help you?” I asked, my knife poised above a mushroom.
“Oh, hey—I was just stopping by cuz I saw all them boxes on the front porch. You guys moving in?”
I looked around for a second, wondering about the effect of a sarcastic sentence like—“No, I’m the non-Mexican maid” and then said, “Uh, yes. Who are you?”
“Oh, yo, I knew the kids that used to live here. This still a party house?” He stuffed his hands in his pockets.
Um, no, that sort of thing doesn’t come in a lease, jackass.
“We go to college, but we don’t party.” I said, conscious the whole time of my four roommates just outside the back porch who were preparing for tonight’s cookout. Hey, it was a cookout, not a party. Sure, whatever, am I making excuses for not being completely honest with the stranger who has just walked into my kitchen to hurl sentences in my face which don’t even have verbs in them?
The man proceeded to repeat his reasons for walking in, “Well, you know, I just saw some boxes and I was just wondering who dis was, what’s going on, you know…”
I’d like to think that his awkwardness at this point was a result of the look I gave him that—that universal look which means why-are-we-on-the-same-planet: head tilted down, eyebrows raised above wide eyes. It was almost a maternal moment, like shoving a ridiculous hat on your child's head before shoving him out the door.
I watched the man walk down the sidewalk through the kitchen window, and proudly reflected on the good that I'd done by snubbing him. This snub may have been one of his first lessons in proper neighbor dealings. I’d like to think of this moment as one of my first neighborly contributions to Harrisonburg, a point on my Karma log. We can pull a Daily Show move and take this look through the ringer of Six Degrees to Neighbor-Makin’.
I gave the ghetto man a look
which made him realize it was inappropriate to walk in strange houses,
which intercepted his meeting the Bearded Lady next door
which made her make friends with the Cat Lady instead
who now gives all her dying, leukemia-ridden strays to the Bearded Lady
instead of us.
Now this is an example of a social lesson which must be learned. But before the Great Migration from the Front Porch to the Back Porch, Dutch earned The Fatalistic Farmer a few bad points on our Karma log by teaching a lesson which may perhaps have been a bit preemptory.
That night, we came to the disheartening realization that nothing is more annoying than a girl who cannot jump rope.
“Wow,” Dutch said suddenly, in a voice loud enough and monotone enough to alert us to the undoubtedly inappropriate words about to emerge from his mouth. “That little girl sucks at jumping rope.”
To put this in perspective, if the little girl had been singing the Cinderella song that most girls sing when they jump rope, the song would have only ever been about a cinder. She couldn’t get past two. On top of this, the girl was in the middle of the street and had the annoying habit of looking over her shoulder every so often to make sure we were watching her.
After a few minutes, the girl moseyed inside, and returned several minutes later with her mother, who made a big show of clapping in loud bursts.
This girl will never grow up and follow her dream of being jump roper. Neither will most of us. I get it. She’s stuck forever now, in this life of crime.
Of course, this is the same little girl that once came over at midnight to ask for a cigarette for her mother, who was still sitting on the front porch, perhaps catatonic from drugs. Of course, this is the same girl who probably will be stuck there forever. Anyway, it’s not helping my karma at all to have this great karma drain of needy kids I could be helping swarming around me, forever flicking me off in my dreams, or appearing randomly in my metaphors to completely destroy my English Major karma points. You know, every time you complete a perfect sentence, something harmonious happens in the spheres, doing whatever it is that spheres do when they are harmonious. It’s all part of the Chain of Life. That’s right. Not the circle. The chain. The woman the Ball and Chain, the man the Balls and Chain, and the children failing to jump rope over their mutually crippling and crippled…chains. And us watching on, with our raised eyebrows and our karma logs, hoping to make a difference. Or raise awareness. Of differences…
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