Today I am grateful for good neighbors. Good neighbors are there, like family. They belong to you by proximity whether you share the same the likes or not, habits or beliefs. They may only wave from the porch where they sit, or they may step over the walk on a Saturday, “How’s your cat? How’s it been? What about the heat?” and smile and admire your ferns. They aren’t always in your life.. but they tend to be there when you need them. The first time I ever had a lemonade stand, my neighbor across the street came out and inquired as to the price. “Ten cents,” I said positively, in my best sales voice. I was amazed as I never saw him. He was all business… or shy, coming and going from the back carport in his suit and hat. But he squinted his eyes and said, “I’ll take a cup,” and then, with a smile, produced a quarter from his suit pants pocket and left it in my cigar box. I thought I was going to retire and move to beach front property. I held the quarter a long time because it had so much kindness to it. Our neighbors next door were teachers.. retired a long time before. “Go show Mrs. Jobe your project,” my mother would say. “She taught math and science.” I would make the trek over, hoping for cookies and show her my love beads glued to cardboard in the form of molecules. She would admire my hydrogen and tell me it was certainly an “A.” She always had colorful shoes. I didn’t know you could wear them in pink. We worried about the drumming… coming from my brother’s room. Drumming, always for hours on end. But they didn’t seem to mind. “They think of you as grandchildren,” my mother would say. “That and I think they are deaf.” Our neighbor two doors down was our doctor. The one who got to sew us up and patch us up and be attacked by plastic arrows when he came with a Shot. But sometimes at night, before it was bed, he brought his guitar over and sat on the couch and played me to sleep with old folk tunes. “Hush a bye.. Don’t you cry.. Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you will find.. Coach and six-a-little horses…” I would sit in my PJs with my bear and dream of the horses I would tend when I grew up. I never knew how much I would miss him. Last week as I lay too sick to move, my neighbor came home from work, and drove me to the clinic. He took me to each office and held the door and my arm. And when they ordered a test that he knew made me scared, he told me it wouldn’t be bad. “It’s never as bad as you think,” he said, “It will be over in a second.” “I’ll buy you a milkshake if you don’t cry.” And when they held my arm down to put a needle in my artery, he grabbed my hand in his and said, “Look at me, Laurens. Just look at me.” And I did. Good neighbors go on with their lives in their own houses much of the time. You pass and wave on the way to the busyness that is our lives. They are not a part of every day, but when you need them, they are there. I was so glad he was there.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 13:43:47 +0000
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