Neighbors

By Doug Downie

Neighbors contains short humorous sketches of characters in a quirky neighborhood in a northern California city. Included in the book are a whimsical fictional piece, a memoir of an old friend, and an essay on fishing and aging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794725850

Book preview

Neighbors

NEIGHBORS, by Doug Downie, Jazzman Publications, Sacramento, CA. Copyright © 2019 by Doug Downie, all rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-79472-585-0

Except for short excerpts no part of this book may be reprinted without permission from the author.

Also by Doug Downie

Cat Came Back and Other Stories

Two Trains Running

Stockboy

God Awful Acres

The Meeting

No One to Blame

Available at:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dadownie1 (cheaper)

Also at Amazon: www.amazon.com

Neighbors

Intro

Neighbor is often thought to be a word conveying a positive feeling. Certain characteristics are layered onto the word that make it a signifier of mutual trust and affection. Neighbors watch out for each other. They have have each other’s backs. They have rarely chosen to be neighbors, but once they are, bit by bit they get introduced to each other, out of sheer proximity, and they get introduced to things that may be more intimate than anything they bargained for. Maybe this sounds corny, but these things are the things that bind them in the timeless hopelessness of being human.

Neighbor will mean different things to people depending on how close they are packed together. In the country—the real country—a neighbor is someone a matter of miles away. In the density of a large city they are breathing down your neck. In the suburbs they sidle up next you without actually touching you. In all these environments some neighbors love each other, and some neighbors hate each other, and many neighbors could care less. There are too many causes that bring strangers together into a shared space to be too close for comfort, or to be completely comfortable, for me to shed any light on the sociology of it.

But I find myself in an interesting neighborhood, in which I’m comfortable, in an uncomfortable way. It’s an odd place of friendly isolation, respectful neglect, and occasional honest and humorous contact. We live in an urban forest, an oasis in the parched grasses of the summer and the swamped wetlands of the winter Central Valley. The population is dense, but the large overarching trees often make it feel less so. Looking at the upper story of the trees you can almost feel as if you were actually in a forest, away from the city. Probably because of this urban forest habitat the neighborhoods have gotten names with Park attached to them: New Era Park, Boulevard Park, Land Park, Curtis Park, etc. A little pretentious, but I get it.

So, I’d like to tell you a bit about some of my neighbors. Mostly the ones that have gotten nicknames attached to them. I know very little about any of them. There are some in close proximity who actually go by their real names—names like David, Ron, Dan, Michelle, Robert, Mark, Maryann, Sherry. These are the ones that we actually interact with (sometimes at least); these are the ones that seem at least semi-normal, to the extent that we see them. However, a few of these also appear in the cast featured below. Except for them, the ones that have gotten nicknames are the ones (maybe living only 3 doors down) who we’ve never spoken to; perhaps we’ve waved back and forth a couple times.

This may be a story of engagement that could be interpreted as the opposite. I don’t have too much defense on that one; but in the end it is a story of affection for my fellows.

It’s hard to know where to start, but let’s begin with:

The Loner

The Loner is a good looking guy of about 40 maybe. He lives across the street and 3 doors down. I know he works a regular and probably pretty good job. I used to encounter him walking to and from his work (he carried a brief case and was dressed nicely) as I was biking my way to and from mine (I wasn’t dressed quite so nicely, though I have a good white-collar job). Both of us headed to and from downtown. If I ever found myself headed in his direction, on the same side of the street, he would quickly cross over to the other side to avoid a close encounter.

For some reason, maybe a new job, The Loner began driving to work. He drives a Prius. I’d see him come home if I was a little early and he’d pull into his drive and disappear. Most of us park in the street but The Loner has a driveway and a garage in the back of his house. Once he’s pulled in there that’s it. He never comes out again. I can see the TV flickering in a window on the side of his house though, from our veranda, where we often sit if it’s not too cold.  We have no backyard or patio or deck or anything. Ron’s place abuts ours in back and he has the backyard.

The Loner’s house is something else.

Our neighborhood is nothing fancy. It’s all single-family homes except for the small apartment building across the road from us. To varying degrees the places are well kept up, and even the places that lean toward scruffy, like ours, simply looked lived in. The Loner’s place looks like the iconic hermit’s shack in the deep dark forest. There are two huge privets in front that block almost all view of the actual house. There is a thick bed of decaying leaves and organic debris carpeting the ground that spills out onto the sidewalk. The path to the front door is overgrown and dusty and nearly impenetrable. You can peer through the morass and see that the screen door is tilted and bent, as are the screens on the front windows. The place has needed a paint job for quite some time. Cobwebs coat so much surface that you can smell them.

In the back, at the end of the weed encrusted track that I’ve called a driveway, is a small out of plumb garage with a corrugated metal