Why I Love My Neighborhood

Some people, hearing my stories about the crazy cat killers and the drunk rednecks who live next door and across the street, can't fathom why we'd want to live where we do. I took a walk this morning, as I always do; but, instead of taking 20-30 minutes, it took almost two hours--all spent walking and talking to people who live in the larger neighborhood around our house, the part of town that's officially designated (with blue ceramic dots in the middle of the street, although most of them are broken and gone now) as The Historic District. This is one of the reasons I love living here, along with the fact that I can easily walk to the bank and library and post office and museum and, oh, yeah, have a mortgage on a 3-bedroom 2-bath house that's $300 a month.

I'll label the people by gender and ethnicity not because that's how I think about them, but for two reasons: to show the diversity that I so love and because, although The EGE knows many of their names, you know that I do not, never mind that I have been told those names on at least one occasion, possibly many more. Plus I don't identify people on my blog unless I know they won't mind. Unless your name is Rosco, which is just too cool not to mention.

So I started out this morning a little after 8 am, later than usual because I'm lazy on Saturdays. In the next block, I stop to talk to Duchess, the cat we've known forever who's moved from the house on the end of our block to the house catty-cornered and now living next door to that--she's been pushed farther and farther away by her people's new cat, Angel, who comes to our house at least twice a day to get The EGE to walk her home and give her treats. Her people gave us a huge bag of food that she refused to eat, asking what we fed her and buying that, instead. So now we give her that same food she refused, not bothering to tell her people that it's not the food she wants, but the attention. She adores being walked home, prissing ahead of us with her tail waving like a banner. But also stopping and trying to twine around your ankles, so that walking her home is actually quite a chore.

Anyway, so I stopped to talk to Duchess, as The EGE had already gone down and given her food when he walked Angel home this morning and kept her from getting into a fight with the pit bull who lives across the street and has figured out a way to escape from his yard. He belongs to the nephew of Angel's people. The people Duchess lives with now--a Hispanic lesbian couple and their children, the eldest of whom was one of The EGE's students who was a handful for his mother, so The EGE would stop and talk to her about the kid when we were walking. He's out of school now and has moved away, so his mother's not so miserable. This morning I talked to her partner, whose cute new car was vandalized during the night--someone whacked out the back window. And I talked to the smallest child who lives there--someone's toddler--who actually wanted me to hold her, which is amazing, since babies loathe me. This one had a saggy diaper, so I suspect she wasn't really being friendly but was part of a Babies Hate Ricë movement. I didn't hold her but waved from a safe distance, in a diaper-free zone of the driveway.

Farther down the street, as I turned north, I waved at the bailiff's wife--the court bailiff lives across the street from the judge (whose cat we also feed--he says she waits for us, although we haven't seen her this summer) in whose court he serves. (These are white people.) Two blocks over, I stop to talk to the woman who lives there--a Hispanic woman whose sister lives in the house across the street. We talk about walking in the neighborhood--she says she's a wuss about walking (they have bars on all their windows), and I tell her how safe it's always been for me, that I've walked the neighborhood many times after dark, as late as 10 or 11 at night, with never any problems unless I walk through the museum grounds and spook myself in the way of the ghost stories I loved as a kid (there was a murder there in the 1960's, when it was a mansion and not yet a museum, and when the wind blows and the weather vane on the carriage house creaks just as you're walking past, it can make you shiver a thrilled, spooked kind of shiver). Supposedly there's a fox who lives on the grounds, but we've never seen it.

A little farther on I see two orange and white cats with collars and bells and stop to talk to them--they're with an very short older white woman who asks, "You're Ricë, aren't you?" and then takes me to see the mother cat who's had three kittens in her flower bed. These are the first kittens I've seen in about 5 years, and I try to squint my eyes and not really look at them much. I try to stay away from kittens, as they are my weakness and I know this woman wants to find homes for them. Except she really doesn't--she's talking about where she'll put them in the winter and when they need to be neutered. We walk a ways, and she says she'll probably have more questions as they get older. Freddie's person had told this woman who I am--Freddie is a Bearded Collie who romps with me in the street. I didn't see Freddie or her friend Bella today, though.Too late for them--they take their walks early.

As I crossed the street, I ran into The Principal. She's the only other black person who lives on our street, and I can never remember her name. I interviewed her once when I wrote for the little liberal newspaper--she's a principal, and her twin sister teaches. She has twin girls, and it all gets very confusing. I can remember (gasp!) her daughters' nicknames (not their full, difficult names), but not hers. So we just call her The Principal. We start to walk and talk about school--she's over the off-campus suspension facility, with The Really Bad Kids, and she loves it. But almost immediately we run into a friend of the family (the Zachery family), a white guy whose name I actually DO remember because he's the only person I've ever known named Rosco, which may be the coolest name on the planet. He asks me if my brother-in-law still has the drum set he was selling, since he, Rosco, wants to buy it for his 7-year-old son, which sounds like sheer masochism to me. (He says they're going to sound-proof his son's room. Yeah, right. Good luck with that.) The Principal goes ahead. I talk to Rosco, and although I don't know anyone's phone numbers, I tell him where their house is so he can go by. Then I walk through the museum grounds and run into The Principal again on the far side, and we walk and talk for 45 minutes, way off my usual route, up and back and around. We run into the white guy down the street who has a bumper sticker on his vehicle that says "Rich Republican," although if he is actually rich, I don't know why he's quit watering his lawn (water has gone way up this summer, and people who used to have really nice green lawns have just given up) and hasn't hired someone to paint the trim on his house, which is looking gnarly. He always walks really rapidly--he may be a member of the walking group--and is walking a dog that's part Blue Heeler. The Principal has a Blue Heeler, so they talk about that--his dog is a rescue dog he found wandering in the alley. Now she's filled out--we won't say plump, because, compared to some of the animals at my house, she's not--and happy, grinning and greeting us cheerily. And well-behaved.

Then The Principal and I stand on the corner and talk, gossiping about home prices (we both bought here when things were very affordable; houses have more than doubled since then--we passed one that she says sold for $130,000 and has only two bedrooms; we are both aghast at this) in the neighborhood and school. When I start to sweat, I know it's time to come home.

And that's why I live here. No matter what time of the day or night you go for a walk, there will be someone else out walking. We know someone to speak to (meaning we might not know their name) in every block. We know even more of the animals.

It's been a sociable week here at The Voodoo Cafe. On Wednesday evening we went to Starbucks to visit--our Redneck Friend was in from out of town (you may remember the story of him way back). Then, on Thursday, we went again to Starbucks and sat outside from 5:30 until 10 pm visiting with someone who is in Odessa helping her son with his business after he had a wreck and needed some assistance. She picked up a copy of one of the magazines and read an article and saw my contact info at the end and sent me a note; and so we met and talked and talked and talked. While I got a LOT of beading done and The EGE took photos of the clouds.

Other than that, it's been mostly writing and beading stuff and spending time outside. I hope to get some photos taken today--we'll see. What's been going on with everyone? I always wonder what fascinating things are happening in other people's lives--you know, people who actually get out of the house on a regular basis and who talk on the phone and stuff (when we were to meet at Starbucks, I had to hunt around the house for my phone. When I found it, it turned out that it had been dead for a couple of days and had to be plugged in so I could retrieve the messages. I hadn't even noticed).

Oh! And I. Watched. TV. Last. Night. Yes! Three hours! It was the season premier of Monk and Psych (if those guys aren't gay, I'm eating my shoes), and The EGE loves House (I don't; too much puking--but I sat with him, anyway). I mute it during the commercials, as I refuse to watch those. But still: TV. Whoa.