On Being Neighborly

Dearest Blog,

My wife and I have lived in our house for just about three years. We live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood where a drunk person might stumble into the wrong house. Despite the similarities in housing characteristics, we don't feel like we have a lot in common with our neighbors. They drive big trucks, watch TV in their garage, and treat Daytona Sunday as their sabboth. For those reasons (and many others) we haven't really made an effort to meet any of our neighbors. In three years, I've met my next door neighbor three times. I say that I've met him three times because we've had to introduce ourselves each time. I've considered looking at his mail just to get his first name again without asking for it. My parents and my inlaws think that we should be more neighborly. Maybe have cookouts and open houses and other things of the sort. Your neighbors might be great people if you get to know them, they say. I've always responded that they might be bad people and we're better not knowing them. Well, it turns out that I was right on that one. We were watching the 10:00 Indianapolis news on Saturday when our house and block was shown during the first segment. Even before the idle chit-chat about the colts, or the weather, or the governor. It turns out that the lady who lives three houses down decided that she should go crazy and shoot her boyfriend and kill their dog. No domestic dispute...just plain crazy. Now this couple was just about our age, didn't have any kids, and would've been a prime candidate for our parents' matchmaking skills. Had we become friends with this couple, I probably would've felt a lot worse about this whole shooting thing and our neighborhood's 15 minutes. Now, there's probably a moral to this blog post, but I'm not sure what that is. I don't think it means you should avoid human interaction. I don't even think it means that people just go crazy. I think the moral of the story is that sometimes you know whats best for you and your parents don't. Well, that's not even true, but the good news is that we didn't know much about the crazy lady, so instead of getting personally invested with their drama, it just makes for entertaining blog fodder.