PLEASE WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

Dear Bloggy Neighbors,

Let's start the day off right with good news. The one, the only, the fishducky, will make a guest appearance here next week on Wednesday. Fishducky, I can  already hear the applause. 

Now I'm going to return to Monday's topic: neighbors. The What? Monday post didn't get much of a response this week. I think many of you were still trying to find me.

You might think it's strange that I've waited till Friday to talk about what I wrote on Monday, but my mind does not work in a linear progression. It jumps from this mountain to that molehill.

So if you don't remember Monday's post, or didn't have a chance to read it, please click here.

I want to regale you with tales of neighbors I've had over the years.


When I married Dr. X, he was a student. We lived in married student housing at a university.

Our little home was at the end of our building -- Apartment K-9. Wasn't that amazingly perfect for a dog lover?


Our very first neighbors were lovely people who had a two-year-old daughter. They were pleasant and friendly. James had been a mortician or undertaker, whatever the correct word is, but he tired of it and went back to school to take pre-med classes.

Linda explained to me that the funeral home owned their lives. Beepers and cell phones didn't exist yet, so he had to stay by the phone 24/7. She said, If we even wanted to go to Dairy Queen for ice cream, we had to find someone to come over and sit by the phone just in case someone died.

I guess the living wanted the deceased outa the house in a New York minute.

James and Linda owned a house and sold it so James could go back to school. Linda was very unhappy living in that crappy little married student apartment. Sadly, when James finished his classes, he couldn't get in to med school.

Happily, he found some other job that didn't require him to return to the penultimate resting place of the dead.

After they moved away, Linda and I wrote to each other for a couple of years. And I mean we used pens on paper.

In one letter she told me how bored she was. I responded that I just kept busy and didn't get bored.

Linda wrote back after a couple of months and said, I took your advice to keep busy and I started a children's music class. I'm so much happier.

Wow! I didn't even intend to give Linda advice. I'm so glad her mood improved, and I hope Life treated their daughter well. She had a huge red birthmark on most of her face that couldn't be removed till she was older. Starting school with a big red bumpy thing on one's face probably led to all sorts of teasing.

I hope a surgeon  eradicated the birthmark  (maybe laser surgery had been invented by that time, which was during the Ice Age) and she didn't spend the rest of her life as a hermit or in a convent because  she once had a red map attached to her face. I think it was Europe. I kind of remember Italy hanging down like a boot, to the left of her mouth.

After James and Linda moved, we moved too: to a different almost as tiny apartment. Favorite Young Man had joined us, so we absconded to L Building, where we had two bedrooms.

Right after we moved, my friend Suzanne, who was majoring in speech pathology, called to tell me about a terrible incident at the university speech clinic, where students could be treated for free. She said they were treating a little boy and his mom, and the dad, who was huge, had caused a terrible ruckus, cursing staff members and screaming threats of violence at his wife and son. Campus Security had to come to the rescue.

Then I met our neighbors. The man was very large. The woman and the little boy had speech impediments. I called Suzanne and asked, What was the name of that little boy whose dad was such a jerk?

Ah, yes. Of course. The jerk and his speech-impaired family were my new neighbors.

We steered clear of them and they didn't really give us any trouble. One time the mom came over with a baby's blue jacket she had found stored among some other stuff. She said, The onwy thwing I cood thwink of was to give this to youw baby.

I thanked her, we chatted with some difficulty, and she left.

Then I wooked at the bwoo jacket. It had aw these weird witta bwown things on it that wooked wike popcorn husks, but were much warger (O.K. That's more than enough of the speech cwap). The brown thingies stuck to the jacket, yet could be pulled off.

When Dr. X arrived, I showed him the jacket. What are these brown thingies? I inquired.

Dr. X frowned and said, Those are from cockroaches.

Did pieces of cockroach stick to the jacket, or did they shed their backs, kind of like a snake shedding its skin?

I didn't know.

I don't want to know.

The bwoo jacket went in the twash.

So, those were my second neighbors following my marriage to Dr. X : The cockroach baby jacket people.

Long gone, but never forgotten.

Sometime in the future I'll tell you more neighborly stories. We moved a lot, so I've had more than my share of new neighbors to whom I had to adjust. And they had to adjust to my slightly offbeat sense of humor. Some of them never understood I was joking.

Remember -- fishducky on Wednesday. Mark your calendars, dear ones.

And the What? Monday post will have to do with weight. Remember how proud I was last spring when I lost 15 pounds? If I can figure out how to do it, I'll put a poll/survey in my sidebar where you can guess how much weight I've lost altogether. Hope you'll participate. I wanna know what you jokers think.

Infinities of love,

Janie Junebug