NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE: NEW PLACES, SAME NEIGHBORS

Neighborhood life changes when you change, otherwise it’s the same thing / different day every day.

Does that sound like a rut? It’s a rut.

Every time you hear the response “Same ol’ same ol'” when you ask how things are going, remember it when someone asks you.

It’s a cry for help. Okay, maybe not a cry, but a whimper? Either way, it’s a mental health call, or a habit. Who knows?

If they don’t know, you should.

A cool guy neighbor across the hall sat down with a group. He was the new guy and wasted that night. But still had his cool guy thing going.

No one was smoking when he lit his cigarette, and no one said a word.

Why? He lit the filter end of his cancer stick and took a good puff. With no recognition to anyone there, he bit off the filter and lit the other end.

I think he’d done it before, so what’s the big deal?

Drinking Lone Star Beer In An Army PX

Back in the mid-70’s you could get a quart soft drink cup of beer in the Fort Sam Houston PX for seventy five cents.

Lone Star, Blitz, and Olympia seemed to all come from the same tap, but in San Antonio no one knew the NW beers the way they would now.

Young men and women, some with more future ahead of them than others, were all classmates in the Army medic school. We drank at the PX instead of the Enlisted Man’s Club to avoid the slick sergeants hitting on our girls.

The young women at the table told those stories. They felt safer with guys their age acting like children.

As the men chugged huge cups of beer, which was important because if you left beer in those tall cheap waxy cups too long they collapsed, the regional personalities showed up.

One of the guys, an old man of twenty four who decided to join the army because nothing else was working out, had the heart of an entertainer.

I could tell he was an entertainer because he always brought his guitar to the table with an offer to teach the women how to play. Not the guys, the girls. And he used plenty of product to keep his hair sharp.

He sweetened the offer by performing cigarette tricks. One of them was smoking it down to just above the butt, rolling it back into his mouth with his tongue and closing his mouth, then rolling it back out to his lips.

That got everyone’s attention.

While he still had the spotlight, he ramped up to lighter tricks to go along with cigarette tricks. The guy was versatile.

The act ended when he caught his hair on fire and no one noticed until the girl next to him dumped his beer on his head. His beer, not hers, which moved the spotlight over.

Apparently the alcohol in hair stuff burns with a faint flame.

Neighborhood Life Fireworks

One 4th of July on the cul de sac, the neighbor and I set up a fireworks platform. We used step ladders and planks for bottle rockets and mortars.

These weren’t the usual bottle rockets, through. He’d contacted a pal in Oklahoma who sent out Indian Reservation fireworks.

The bottle rockets looked like road flares stuck on 2 X 2’s.

After it got dark enough we lit a bunch. For all the smoke they generated, they could have had a little safety flare in them.

Half an hour in, two policemen walked through the smoke to shut things down. The rockets had landed on rooftops a few blocks away and they made the call.

It looked like the cops had materialized out of thin air when they asked who the responsible party was. I stepped forward because I knew my neighbor had had some police experience from his two terms in the Oregon State Prison, with one shortened by a stint at Shutter Creek.

But he beat me to the punch and spoke in a way that showed the police he respected them, their presence on the road, and their request. Nothing I could add would have mattered.

It was a happy ending, sparklers and all, instead of some power play, misunderstanding, and going downtown.

The Importance of Neighborhood Life

Your neighbors are the people who will talk about you in interviews if you go missing, or screw up in some huge way.

You’ve heard these interviews before:

“What was he like? He was nice, but quiet and kept to himself.”

Or,

“We didn’t really see him. He didn’t come outside much.”

Or,

“He was friendly and outgoing, held fun parties, kept the neighborhood alive. There’s no way he stormed the capitol on Jan 6, but we saw the video.”

What will your legacy be? Here’s mine:

“People call the yard a weed patch, overgrown, unruly. But he insisted it was an ‘English Garden.'”

“He had one of those propane flame throwers that hooks to a tank and used it to burn off weeds in his walkways. One day he caught a shrub on fire that spread to a lilac tree. He was fast to put it out. Like a fireman.”

“If he saw us outside on a hot day he’d bring drinks over.”

That’s the right kind of neighbor. Lone Star in a paper cup for extra points.

Be a good neighbor and neighborhood life is more rewarding.