the rohn report
the rohn report
next door neighbors
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next door neighbors

10

I live in a house in the suburbs of a large American city. I have next door neighbors on both sides and up and down the tree lined street.

My neighbor, Mark, is a landscape architect, well I suppose that may be the reason why he doesn’t talk to me. I never do landscaping of any kind, I just try to control Nature. A little bit. Trim and shape.

On the other side, the Gilbert’s with their daughter, the Queen of the Ball. Atleast until she had to go to school and get with the program. She would come over to my house when she got home from school and play teacher with the white board; she was quite strict too. Well, she’d been playing at my house since she was 3, so it was a familiar place for her and a way to process not being the Queen of the Ball anymore. Now she’s a teenager and working at Hooter’s.

Across the street, some new neighbors, who I have sort of met. The daughter, when she was out front trimming the trees one day. Notice I’m not mentioning names. Her name is Scoobee Doo. No not really.

Next to them, a multi-child house with two parents. They party with the neighbors across the street every Friday evening, set the lawn chairs out in the lawn with some adult beverages. A relic left over from the shut down days when nobody could go anywhere. Plus they got kids the same age. A ramp built out of 2X4’s and plywood to jump over on their bikes is their thing, or shooting hoops in the street.

On the other side, across the street, is a family who has completely disappeared. I mean they’re still there but I don’t see them. They used to be out and about with their two kids, age 6 and 9 or thereabouts but no more. Just two big SUV’s sitting in the semi-circular driveway.

Up and down the street I know people. The Simons, Curtis, George and Deborah, Charles, some others. We’re next door neighbors.

When the big winter storm hit last February, the Gilberts came over to my house with all the large containers and jugs they could find and filled them up with water and took them home. Their water pipes had burst and they had no water. Snow was everywhere (a rarity in San Antonio) and the neighbors, one block over, lost power. For like a week. They had to stay with friends. Or go to a hotel. Asking a neighbor would have been the last resort. ‘Hey my house is frozen, could I sleep at your house for a while? On the couch or something?’

But for most of the next door neighbors, ‘next door’ is another world . They don’t really know the people. May not even know their name or where they’re from or what they do.

I have a friend from West Africa and he told me that once his father came to visit and he didn’t really like it because the neighbors didn’t talk to each other. It was weird to him. Strange and uncomfortable.

Well yeah. It could be a serial killer. A serial killer posing as a next door neighbor. You don’t know that. So we play it safe and don’t talk to anyone, unless we have a reference. Or they’re walking their dog. Those people are usually pretty safe.

‘Next door’ is something you share a common border with, but unlike the butterflies, never cross it. The butterflies will fly wherever they want. Mostly where the flowers are. Mostly in my yard, actually. Wild flowers around the edges, lantana, morning glories, a few others I don’t know the names of, eight foot high sunflowers. Well those are for the birds. They pick the seeds out of the center. But the birds cross the border too. They sing for everyone.

On my side of the fence I sleep under the mosquito netting, in the backyard, on the futon. I can hear the bird who sings in the night. I don’t know who it is. Too small to be a mocking bird. But he sings for the neighbors too. I doubt if they hear him though. They sleep inside with the air conditioner on.

I can also watch the moon sail across the sky. When it’s full it rises early and as it wanes, rises later and later. It’s quite something to look up there and see the moon. Going thru its phases, glowing. When it’s full it’s like someone left the light on.

I remember sleeping outside for the first time after two months of rain and waking up in the night and wondering where the spotlight was coming from and why were they shining it on me? It was one day after the full moon, in a clear sky.

My next door neighbors didn’t see it. They were asleep in their beds. With the doors locked. In case a serial killer wanted to come in.

Actually it seems weird and strange to me too. We have next door neighbors but we don’t actualize the possibilities. We might as well be living on the top of a mountain or in the middle of the desert or on a deserted island. We see the cars passing in the street and know our neighbors are alive and moving about but that’s all. We don’t share our music, our taste in cuisine, our strategies for survival. Oh, well that would be for after the apocalypse, I suppose, when a next door neighbor will be an actual resource.

I imagine some sort of tribal society after some sort of apocalypse. I could be wrong though. Maybe we’ll just keep living like this until our children grow up and take over. Their next door neighbors are on their phone. We just live on the same street for convenience, you know - garbage pickup, access to downtown, the grid. We’ve all got cars and there are streets everywhere so what does it matter? Their next door neighbors could be 3 states over or on the other side of the world.

Still there’s something about place and space although I’m not sure what it is; I’ve not actualized the possibilities either. I live on my own lot. My biosphere, as I call it. Bugs and birds and small lizards and fish in the pond.

If my backyard were the whole world, there would be no borders and lots of next door neighbors. The dragonflies, the spiders, the bats, the bugs - they are all very neighborly. They eat each other. Whoever they can catch that fits in their mouth.

The giant pecan towers over my little biosphere like the tree of life in the myths of the world. The fish pond lays beneath it like the primordial pond of creation, filled with algae and microbes and small fish. The groovy nook with its smaller ponds adjoins it, where I meditate until the mosquitos chase me off.

Who needs next door neighbors anyhow?

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