rekkidblogga

Deconstructing this fence isn't easy

My neighbor, Melissa, told me last night that another neighbor's father had died about a month ago. Of course it saddened me to hear that but I was upset at myself because I shouldn't have had to hear it secondhand. If I was a better neighbor, I'd have known.

We met them literally by accident when we were getting ready to move into our then new house back in the summer of 1981. The emergency brake on my dad's car slipped out of gear and it rolled quietly down the gently sloping street, taking out their mailbox and coming to a stop in their front yard right next to their front door. Mr. H was amazingly genial about it all, laughing and joking with my dad, who quickly wrote a check to replace the mailbox while apologizing up and down. Meanwhile, his eight-year-old daughter, Patti, introduced herself to me in what is still the strangest way any child has ever said hello to me up to this day. "Hi," she said brightly, "My name is Patricia H. but everybody calls me Patti and nobody understands me." It was like meeting a "Peanuts" character.

For a while, when I first moved in, we were friends. Patti and I rode bikes together on her end of the street after school and played games. But then I got to know the boys up on my end of the block and that was that. She wasn't the kind of girl who enjoyed being the tomboy invited to hang around while Kevin, Mike, Jamey, Jamie, Jeff, Tim, Michael and Simon rode bikes, played Nerf tackle football, baseball or H-O-R-S-E. Patti didn't get a kick out of hanging out in Jamey's basement like I did, debating who was cooler -- Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Rolling Stones -- while watching him fix his treasured Diamondback BMX bike while we listened to Ozzy Osbourne decades before he became a cuddly, if brain-damaged, rock dad on an MTV reality show.

And so now, Patti and I barely know each other. She's 32; I'm 33. She's got a 12-year-old daughter and is a really good mom. We've chatted, handed out leaflets to fight an apartment developer who wanted to clear-cut the woods behind our neighborhood. But are we friends? No. I'd suspected something had happened to her dad since I hadn't seen him around like usual. You live in a neighborhood long enough, you get to know the people and their patterns.

I want to let Patti know that I'm sorry about her father's passing. He had a brain tumor, Melissa said. I want to open the gate to the fence that I put up back in 4th grade that's kept me from walking just down the street and making friends with the first friend I had in my neighborhood, the only other kid from the block who still lives here after all these years.

It's strange, trying to pry out these rusty nails after so many years when I don't even really remember why I felt a need to hammer them in at all.

posted by rekkidbraka @ 11:05 AM