I walk the same path day after day. It winds through my neighborhood, located halfway up a tiny little mountain.
It’s a nice route, just far enough to hold the baby’s interest if she’s active or lull her off to sleep when she’s tired.
Though I don’t actually know any of my neighbors, I see enough to learn a little about their lives and let my imagination fill in the rest.
I try not to judge them (though sometimes I fail) and instead channel my observations into a meditation and appreciation for my common man.
“We all need to coexist,” I tell myself, “and this is how these unique people choose to do it.”
One of the first things I usually notice is my mailman because he drives by my house at least four times a day. This seems like too many passes for a man on a route, especially along a stretch of road with mailboxes on only one side.
My best guess is that he has urgent bathroom needs and my home is on his path towards relief. It must be hard having a small bladder as a mailman.
He’s just one of many people who regularly pass by multiple times on my walks.
There’s also the ATV guy loudly four-wheeling his sadness around the mountain every Saturday afternoon and the elderly couple who drive up and down their steep driveway to check the mail and then keep on going.
It doesn’t matter what time of day I walk past, they’re always heading somewhere, even since the pandemic started and most frail people are scared to look at anything but Fox News.
At first, I worried one had a pressing medical need, like dialysis, but the time fluctuations make me think perhaps they’ve got a scratch-ticket habit requiring them to venture back and forth redeeming winning Sunny Money tickets.
There are several sports enthusiasts in my neighborhood, though significantly more driveway basketball hoops than driveway basketball players.
The most committed athlete is a tweenage girl who’s always bouncing a lacrosse ball off a rebounder mat in her front yard.
She lives in the house with too many cars and I imagine this time outdoors is a very necessary relief from however many people are inside.
The most sports-committed parents are in the house with a thousand balls but rarely any sports being played. The father keeps an agility ladder set up in the garage, which might be why his kids’ favorite sport appears to be riding their bikes away from him.
Then there are the parents who hit their kids. Not in a child-protective-calling way (that I’ve seen), but enough to raise my eyebrows.
They probably consider themselves the most athletic family because of their painted street hockey driveway and strong Mom slaps, but they’re just the most aggressive.
Social distancing has proven challenging for them. Their small family walks quickly grew in size (along with the number of bumper-stickered cars in their driveways) until they took up the whole length of the road like a Junior Varsity street gang.
And now they’ve happily disappeared again, possibly to some underground lacrosse league operating on society’s fringes.
The roller skating neighbors are the most fun. Four kids with eight wheels each flying between their driveways with the sort of enthusiasm you hope for in kids.
Their elbow pads and helmets are a good contrast to the elderly daredevil next door who once stood precariously on a milk crate with an electric hedge trimmer in both hands, the cord wrapped around his legs, and a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
My favorite neighborhood family is the one who moved in last spring and almost immediately started building a tree house.
I know this because I shouted, “What are you building?” and the father replied, “a tree house.”
Yet, after getting the floor and ladder set up in just one day, they stopped.
Every day I walked past expecting to see something new like walls or a roof. Then they added a hammock and I realized they were done.
On the way home I saw the advertisement on the father’s work van and finally made the connection.
“I figured it out!” I excitedly texted my wife (who very sweetly entertains my ridiculous neighborhood theories).
“His van advertises flooring services, not walls and roofs. When it comes to flooring, he’s the best around, but it’s ALL he knows.”
“He’s not a professional waller, he’s a floorer. He’s sticking to what he knows and I respect it. If his kids complain, he’ll tell them flooring’s what put food on their table. Their tree house is just a floor. It’ll always be just a floor and they’ll have to learn to like it!”
My heart swelled with a newfound appreciation for my neighbor, the noble floor installer standing up to the Big Wall interests and proudly proclaiming that quality floors are enough.
Until last week, eleven months after our conversation, when the walls went up and my heart sank down.
With reflection, I now applaud him for adding another skill to his set. I no longer look to the tree house with anticipation each time I round the corner. Now, I look for his van expecting to see it updated to read “flooring and walls.”
If you enjoy my humor writing, please subscribe below.
If you want to syndicate this column, you may contact me here to discuss the details.
You may notice that I’ve disabled commenting on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts by email at [email protected].
Check out The Uncommon Discourse Podcast, where acclaimed storyteller Chris Gaffney reads and discusses ten of his most popular humor columns.
Each episode is under ten minutes long and features Chris reading a favorite article along with a brief description of why the article means so much to him.
Find Season 01 on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn.com, or stream/download episodes here: https://uncommondiscourse.com/podcast.