neighbor

The first time I encountered my neighbor, I was coming in from visiting a friend and had a slate of things to do before the afternoon got too far ahead of me. He called to me through the thick lilac bushes that border our yards and asked if we were renting, or if we’d bought the place. I peered through the leaves but couldn’t get a good look at him through the greenery except to figure out that he was in the process of digging up a stump on his side of the border. I answered and politely asked if he knew the owners, if they had ever occupied the house? I soon found myself stuck there on the other side of the bushes while he told me about the entire later part of his life, which included bicycle-touring through Myanmar and China and working as a parking lot attendant for years downtown. By the time I managed to make a smooth exit, most of the afternoon was burned away and I had an earful of adventures to ponder but no face to put with it. Also, I found out that I share my name with his wife.

Flash forward a month, and these neighbors are undertaking and enormous landscaping project by hand, tearing up the earth around the foundations of their home. The wife, covered from head to toe against the sun and listening to podcasts on her laptop balanced precariously on a rock next to her, is dismantling the current footing stone by stone and placing each fragment in a bucket. I can see her obliquely through the screen as I nibble my breakfast each morning. When I take out the recycling, we make eye contact and I have a flash of inspiration.

“Hello! Say, would you like some tomatoes? I have more than I can possibly eat!”

A thin old man, all muscle and sinew, grey beard trimmed perfect and short, emerges from behind the cover of lilac bushes by the back of the house. His cargo pants are held precariously by a belt notched as small as it can get. I can see the veins running up his lean arms from across the yard.

“Honey, would you like tomatoes?”

“Well, sure!”

I dodge back into the house to lighten my load, and return with a target bag full of the red plague, only to be regaled for nearly an hour with stories of landscaping, re-roofing and bidding on a garage while his wife listens next to us, eying her project, weighing eagerness to get back at it with politeness to her husband’s monologue and my presence. I see that she is probably from India or Bangladesh. I learn that they have been married for going on twelve years. I also learn all about how important soffits are to keep a roof from sagging, and that the peeling paint along a window behind him is from a terrible leak that occurred last spring, and that he likes to keep business “in the family.” I try not to shuffle my feet in impatience to get back to my own desperate day of cramming for final exams, or procrastinating from such a task, as the case may be. But when I finally wrench myself away, I wonder what other stories would have been forthcoming if I had been patient enough to listen for a little while longer.