Can You Borrow WHAT?
(If this is the American dream, please wake me up.)
Ah. Saturday morning in suburban America. The sounds, the smells. The camaraderie, the cable outages, the collapsing property values. Backyard barbecue served here, custody papers served there. The endless parade of roof replacement scam squads. The bank-dodging "everything must go" yard sales, the revolving army of moving vans. The lazy flutter of foreclosure notices.
I live in a nice, middle-class neighborhood. "Neighborhood" is a complex Old English term, roughly translated as "ye olde credit default swappe." (Call Ethelred today for ye very own! Verily, canst this offer not last!)
My neighborhood is one of those planned communities with a cute, oxymoronic name, like Nepalese Shores, or Aerie Caverns, or Upside Downs. The developer followed the standard Bulldoze-Claw-Cajole plan: sell off every extant tree, scrape off every micron of topsoil, buy off every minor official. Nudge-nudge-wink-wink your way past your ex-wife's second cousin at the Building Inspector's office, slap up several hundred mildly divergent versions of six pre-fab floor plans, disconnect your "Award-Winning Service – After The Sale!" phone number and then vanish from the known universe.
In my cute, oxymoronic neighborhood, Mordor Shires (Third Age, Phase Two), I live at the end of a cul-de-sac. "Cul-de-sac" is a complex French term, roughly translated as "Hey, Joe, see if you can't shoehorn one more 3BR Portsmouth Deluxe in there, in-between the legal plats. Wink-wink."
Now, in and of itself, living on the toe of a cul-de-sac is pretty cool. Zoning variances allow me an oversized back yard and, in the evenings, oncoming headlights keep my daylilies nervous, wondering if today is The Day. Plus, when the developer's mop-up team got around to the house numbering scheme, they got confused. As a result, my house is number 26, but the house on my left is #24 and the house on my right is #25. So I'm constantly getting to read other people's mail. (After all, there's a reason the US Post Office lost 8.5 billion dollars in 2010.)
However, in my case, there's a down side to living at the end of the block. Due to prevailing wind patterns, my cul-de-sac acts as some sort of telescoping wind tunnel, focusing and funneling anything that is loose, or gets loose, or loses its footing, down the street and into my yard, particularly if it's something that's brightly colored, non-biodegradable and/or marginally toxic.
SIDEBAR: I was going to say that the wind blows things down the street and "onto my lawn," but honesty compels me. I don't own a lawn – I have a yard. A yard is that buffer zone that surrounds your physical dwelling and ends at your neighbor's buffer zone, usually demarked by a disputed fence that leans like bad teeth and a half-dead tree that has even less dependable roots than the teeth. A lawn, on the other hand, implies commitment, which immediately rules me out. The term suggests that the owner cares about his "yard" enough to treat it as a "lawn," even during the heat of August in the American South, a sadistic chunk of the calendar when small, furry forest animals have been known to suddenly explode, or at least ask to.)
So, I'm forever staring out my window (literal translation: "working from home") as stuff blows at, against, and past my house.
And does stuff ever blow! Mail, garbage, laundry, lunch wrappers. Foreclosure threats and savings account invites, often from the same bank. "Vote For Me, Please" pleas; vast savings on volume discounts; very small pets. Realtor placards with "For Sale" scribbled out and "For Rent" Sharpied in, or appended with "NU LO PRICE!" (spelled, apparently, by someone with a Master's degree in Post Office)
Mind you, not all of this wind-mailed detritus is necessarily a bad thing. When the local pizza delivery franchise issues a new discount coupon, for instance, I end up with dozens. As a single guy, I'm set for weeks. The same goes for our four nearby Chinese takeaways; Great Wall Joy Food, Panda Food Joy Wall, Wall of Great Panda Joy, and Bank of America.
But the rest are mostly Mom-n-Pop entities offering unique products or niche services, like low-maintenance vinyl siding treatments ("now in creative geometricalized patternizations!"), miniaturized rock-garden river rapids ("tiny inbred banjo player, not included"), or ferret whispering.
And, interestingly, some of these marketers have taken clever steps to ensure that rogue wind gusts don't defeat their advertising efforts. For example, they'll slip their little flyer in a small Ziploc bag and then shovel in a short handful of pebbles or pea gravel – the idea being that the rocks' extra weight will keep the wind from carrying off their bulk-printed two-color advertisements, touting custom-treated balsa decks or free-range parrot colon cleansing.
Fortunately, these bag-lobbing advertisers usually include their own home address somewhere inside the rock-filled bag they toss, uninvited, onto my property, making it quite easy for someone like me to figure out where they live, sometime around two in the morning, if you get my drift.
Anyway, here's what went down this week at #26 Mordor Shires. I was out in my "lawn," collecting several hundred wind-whipped yellow flyers advertising the services of Mark, The Lakeland Area's Undisputed Mulch King. ("Because Compost Happens!")
A few more-or-less consecutive house numbers up, I noticed a U-Haul truck in a driveway. So I watched for a while to see if they were taking stuff out of the truck, or putting stuff in; to see if I was gaining, or losing, a neighbor. But I never saw anybody, doing anything, period.
Maybe they'd simply decided to buy a U-Haul truck.
And then a friend told me about a story she'd heard on the news: apparently, some people were renting moving vans and using them as temporary meth labs.
Ah, well. At least somebody's working in America. And if there's a market out there, clamoring for temporary meth, who am I to tsk-tsk, eh?
A little while later, while I was loading pea gravel in the scatter-gun (if you get my drift), there came a knock on my door. Lo and behold, it was my neighbors from the U-Haul house! A slimmish young couple, obviously on a first-name basis with several tattoo parlors, they asked if they might borrow a cup of sugar and, if it wasn't a huge bother, maybe some anhydrous ammonia or phenylpropanolamine, and a dash or two of red phosphorus.
Now, I like to be a helpful neighbor. And I had no immediate need for that occasionally handy keg of phenyl in the basement, nor the red phosphorus I keep in the fridge door for Jehovah's Witness counter-measures, but please … processed sugar? I haven't used processed sugar in decades.
But, to be honest … well, yeah! What do you think? Of course I wondered what they were up to! Of course I got nervous!
What if these two were miscreants who hadn't acquired the proper permits? What if they were simply enabling parents of impressionable children, gearing up to
(gasp)
sell lemonade without a license?
