Where we used to live, we had neighbors who were our complete opposites. But, as they say, opposites attract, so we ended up being pretty good friends. Well, I became good friends with them anyway. They were interesting to me because I thought they were so odd and eccentric. I really liked them despite of how different we were. They were aggravating to my husband because they would be waiting in our driveway every day when we got home from work. My husband is not very sociable and this habit of theirs drove him crazy.
The husband, George, from Germany, would talk for hours upon hours about how evil companies like Step Two and Disney were, with all their plastic toys and propaganda, spoiling even more all the spoiled rotten American children. Yet, there they would be in our backyard every day so that their daughter could play in our son's own version of Disneyland, happily provided by my mother for her first grandchild, and wanting to borrow our Dumbo VHS tape over and over again.
They would go to the local market every Saturday to stock up on only the best meat and vegetables, making every meal from scratch. We were lucky to get home by 7pm every night, so that whatever we ordered for dinner would arrive by 8pm.
They were both professors and complained constantly about how stressed out and tired they were and I never understood that. I know that everyone's stress level is relative, but they were both home from work every day between 2 and 3pm and they had their summer's off.
We took one, one week vacation every summer. And call me crazy, but I do imagine that three months in Maine, in a quaint cottage on a lake is much more relaxing than five days at Myrtle Beach.
George would say...Blue Girl, I cannot believe you only take one week off a year.
Well, George, you and me both.
I was grateful for that one week off. They thought we were nuts.
George spent a couple of years studying and dissecting one poem from like, the 14th century. He even traveled to Europe somewhere and spent several months in the house where the poem was written.
I would tease him that I had spent the day coming up with a masterpiece of a headline!
George! Listen to this. Do you think someone's going to remember this 600 years from now?
Some Lawnmowers Are Better Than Others.
And This Is Some Lawnmower!
Blue Girl, I don't understand why you would be in the advertising field. Aren't you embarrassed by it?
I would just laugh and say...I know it's not a noble profession, but I do take pride in not dropping dead every day from the sheer amount of work I do.
I told my boss, the owner of the ad agency I worked for at the time, who was a great, great friend of mine, what George had said.
My boss said...Did you tell him to F*** off?
No! I got a kick out of it. And anyway, think about what we do, Tony. No one cares. They throw it away the instant they get it. They completely ignore it! We're wasting our lives! We're total losers! You more than me, though.
Oh, F*** off.
George and Janet would do other odd things. At least odd to me. At the end of every summer they would dig up all the flowers they had planted and then put them in their basement under a grow light, trying to keep them alive over the winter so they could replant them in the spring. They looked half dead all the time and I just never thought all that was worth the effort. Plus, they'd replant them sporadically, in little patches they would dig up all over their front yard. It was quite Addam's Family-ish.
But, who am I to talk? I would spend a fortune every Spring on flowers and they looked half dead within weeks.
I would describe Janet as an Earth Mother. Breastfeeding her kids till they were much, much older than I ever would have done it. Making all their baby food from scratch. Using baby furniture that had been passed down through their families for generations. Beautiful, old wooden furniture. Never wore makeup, always kept her long hair back in a ponytail. Yet, when Janet would walk her daughter in the stroller in the early evening, she would wear a very tight, very short, black mini skirt and 4" bright red high heeled shoes. The only explanation I could ever think of for that was that George had a little streetwalker fantasy and Janet was more than happy to oblige.
One time they were over when The Skimmer got home from work and they saw him empty the change in his pockets and put it in a jar we had on the kitchen counter. The jar at that point was more than halfway filled with change.
Skimmer? Why do you put change in that jar?
Um. It's our change jar.
What do you mean...change jar?
It's a jar we throw our loose change in at the end of the day.
Why do you do that?
Um, what do you mean?
Well, why don't you spend it? Or put it in a savings account?
Um, well, I don't know.
I've never seen someone with a change jar.
I just stood there thinking...Change jar confusion! Are we the oddballs? Or are they?!
We haven't seen George and Janet in years. But, I've been thinking about them a lot lately because I got an email recently from George that said he and Janet were getting divorced. They were each moving, going in opposite directions, and he just wanted to let us know. The news shocked me. They seemed so similar. They seemed to fit. But, that's silly. What do I know about how they fit? And it shouldn't have been surprising at all, considering the divorce rate, but it made me sad nonetheless.
I had a meeting near our old neighborhood last week and decided to drive down our old street on my way home.
The trees we all had planted in the tiny yards of the houses our babies were born in were much taller. The ivy that grew up our old stone chimney was growing wild, only the tiny circular, lead-glass window on the third floor could be seen. George and Janet's yard pretty much looked the same, yet the flowers that had been planted by the new owners were fully alive and thriving. My beautiful black iron gate that I had to have was still there and so was George and Janet's tire swing.
But none of us were there anymore. And the thought of that made me feel really odd. So, I took a deep breath and drove home.
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