clickmom

life's a gamble

Go to mycrazyneighbor.com for a good laugh. I thought I was tough to live with! I am actually quite jealous that this blogger has a neighbor that puts on some great shows for her to photograph and write about. Once upon a time I was that neighbor, and in the past I have had those neighbors, but out here in the suburbs life is, well, with out much excitement.

I actually have to read the news paper to find exciting neighbor-type stories. People in this burb just do not display their private lives on the street. BORING! Here is the juice from my burb..... The woman who will be the PTA president for my kids elementary school next year was in a car accident. She tried to leave the scene of the crime, but her vehicle was so messed up, it only went a little bit before giving out. When the police arrived she refused to blow the breathalyzer, apparently a big mistake. I hear you get the maximum if you won’t blow, and you should blow no matter what kind of bad shape you are in.

What no one, meaning police or newspaper, is saying is whether or not the car she hit was parked or moving, or any of the details of the accident. I assume no one else was hurt or we would have heard about that.

Well, living in fear of making any type of mistake, I for one would never ever drive drunk, but I have to admit that if I accidentally hit another car and there were no witnesses I would take off for sure. My vehicle has been hit so many times, and never did any one confess or heaven forbid offer to pay for the damage they caused. I even got into a fender bender in a notoriously poorly planned parking lot right here in my town and it was the other woman's fault, (she tried to zip by me as I was backing up out of a spot) but somehow I had to pay her $800 dollars to repair her 12 year old car! The world owes me a few.

I saw the accidental driver at our towns little fair for kids today, and wanted to say something supportive, but all I could think was “I’d leave the crime scene too.” and I didn’t think she would know that that particular statement was meant to be supportive. Personally, I wouldn’t shame her out of town, or even care as long as I realized that this was a one time thing and that my children could play in front of our house without having to watch in fear of her vehicle coming down the street.

Of course if you ever, as I have done, walk down the street on the morning that the recycling is put out for collection you would see that there is an interesting mix of wine bottles and milk jugs in most homes recycling bins. They recyclers come every other week and many of my neighbors are able to fill an entire trash can with wine bottles, and they just aren’t having that many parties! (Cause I’d see the cars lines up on the block while I was doing my nightly spy, that’s how I know.)

Don’t get me started about the high concentration of Sr. citizen drivers either, I won’t even go there except to say there is a certain grocery store popular with the seniors that I try to avoid going near for fear of collision with behemoth older sedan type vehicles.

Then there are they teens, with nicer vehicles than I ever had. Around here teens are likely to drive BMWs, Jeeps, and even Daddy’s mid life crisis convertible sports cars. The teens tend to go too fast, vibrate down the street, and not do those silly things like stop for stop signs. Those silly stop signs, what are they for any ways?

So, you pretty much take your life in your hands every time you get behind the wheel of your gas guzzling behemoth SUV out here, but life is a gamble, and hey, aren’t we all players whether we admit it or not?

Me, the school yard, and the cops.

When we still lived in Manhattan, we still had 2 dogs, and there was a constant fight between dog owners and the rest of the world, regarding whether or not dogs could go in certain areas. One place near my home where we dog owners liked to congregate and take our dogs off the leash was a fenced in school yard on East 75th Street. We would show up after 5 and let our dogs run around for a little while. We were a conscientious group, and always picked after our dogs, and our dogs were well behaved. It was a time of day that the owners looked forward to as much as the dogs.

However, there was another group of dog owners who would meet there later at night and not pick after their dogs, and allow their dogs to do a great deal of barking late at night. The school would complain about the dog mess and the board members of the condo next door was always pressuring the cops lock up the yard and keep us out. Their

A cat and mouse game between dog owners and cops began. We would go, they would kick us out, sometimes they would ticket us. It was miserable. Some cops would just look at us and we would leave, others did the tough cop routine.

One day I was in the school yard with a couple of people and one of the tough cops came. We leashed up our dogs and headed out. I was last one out, and the cop asked asked me something, and when I didn’t give him the answer he wanted he grabbed me by the jacket arm and pulled me face to face with him. Then he started to threaten me, and I remained silent because I was just so shocked that he had grabbed me, and he was actually twisting my sleeve to tighten his hold on me. Finally I said “Let go of me.” and he refused, and I kept saying “Let go of me.” while he continued to threaten me, until I leaned closer into his face and said, “Listen, my husband is an attorney, and you and both know that you have no right to touch me. I can keep you in court for the rest of my life and it isn’t going to cost me a penny, so now let go of me.” And he did, and I held my head high, walk out turned to the opposite direction of my home, walked while he followed me, and went to a friends apartment where I broke down in tears, I was terrified. We watched out her window until he left the block, and I dashed home. The next day I put on my sweetest maternity clothes, went down to the precinct, and picked up papers to file a complaint.

I got a phone call to confirm my story, when the phone cop asked how old I was I told him I was 28 and 6 months pregnant, and just grinned from ear to ear, knowing that tough cop was going to get his.

Crazy Dan, The Dogs, and Me

As I mentioned in my last blog, someone that I always assumed was Jackie, had been tossing trash into our yard, mostly whenever the dogs went at each other more than usual. Then, the unimaginable started to happen, the dogs, we had two by then, began coming back into the apartment with shit on their breath. Living in NYC and being a frequent visitor to Central Park, (apparently not only New York’s playground but New York’s Toilet) this was actually not the most uncommon experience.

The shocking part about this bad breath was that it was some how coming from our back yard. I couldn’t imagine where it was coming from, and spent much time energy trying to figure out if a homeless person had somehow started living back there when we were not home. We had a doggie door and the dogs would often drag branches, or the tin cans I had become accustomed to, through the door, but imagine my shock when I came home from work one day to find they had dragged a plastic bag full of shit into the middle of the room and shredded it. The smell hit me before the sight, and I was fit to be tied. I donned rubber gloves and began cursing, fuming, picking up the pieces of the fouled blockbuster bag when I came across a signed credit card receipt. The name on the bag was unfamiliar to me, so I went up to the mailboxes to see if Dan White was a building resident. Sure enough there he was on the third floor, and if he leaned out of his apartment just right he could toss a bag into our yard. I returned to the crime scene gathered up the remainder of the mess, went up to the third floor and smeared it on Dan White’s door. Then I propped the shredded bag on the handle so it would fall into his apartment when he opened the door. I figured Mr. Dan White would clean up the mess and learn his lesson.

A few days later I bumped into the building Super in the hallway, Hugh told me what someone had done to Dan’s door, and warned me to be on the look out. Apparently Dan was known around the building as Crazy Dan, and rumor had it that he had a drug problem, and now the residents were worried that some seedy characters had gotten into the building and they were afraid. Then Hugh told me how disgusting it had been to clean up the mess. I didn’t confess right away, but I did apologize to Hugh the next day, with a very big bottle of scotch in my hand.

Jackie, golf clubs, and cops

I hate to admit it, but I log on several times a day to see how many people are viewing my web log. Thank you to the seven or so loyal people who log on each time I post something. It warms my heart to know that you are interested, if you have any suggestions feel free to comment. (constructive criticism only please) I’d love to reach more people and am not sure how. Today I checked on someone’s search, and saw that they searched “How to loose my cranky self” and ended up with my post I wrote after spending a vacation with my father. One of the other results was another web log with the title “That Crazy Neighbor Lady”, and it got me to thinking how I used to be That Crazy Neighbor Lady, so I thought I would share a couple of the stories of insanity that involved me when I lived on East 75th street in Manhattan.

The first story involves Jackie, the heavily accented high faluting middle aged French upstairs neighbor. Jackie was not meant for apartment living, she liked to complain about the noise. When I had bronchitis she jumped out of her apartment to stop me in the hallway and tell me couldn’t sleep all night listening to me cough, when we adopted a mistreated, seriously damaged dog, that the rest of the building pitied, we had her spayed and Jackie complained she could hear the dog crying out in pain the night of her surgery. When she wasn’t listening for me in the hallway ready to leap out of her apartment looking for a confrontation, she was banging on her floor with what I assumed was a broom handle, at least that is what I banged back on our ceiling with.

Now we had the apartment in the basement at the rear of the building, and in exchange for being behind the incinerator and across from the laundry room was a nice big backyard that was ours alone. There were three yards, and the other two belonged to the other poor souls who lived in the low ceilinged basement along with us. Now, the next door neighbor had a feral pug, (I know, I know, they are typically a very nice breed) who would go mad when he heard our 15 pound beagle back there in the yard and the two of them would go at it on either side of the fence. The pug made a little hoarse scrubbing sound, it was barely detectible, and our beagle bayed. Guess who pissed the neighbors off?

From time to time someone would throw down eggs, garbage, and empty tin cans. I assumed (although in hindsight most likely erroneously, wait 'til the next story....) That the culprit was Jackie. Some of the cans were from food that I had never eaten, like vienna sausage, and I thought she was the VS type. So, needless to say, I felt incredible malice towards Jackie.

One day the two dogs were going at it fiercer than ever. I was tired and cranky and probably about 6 months pregnant with Matthew. I had run out side to separate them a few times, and answered her broom banging with my own, and when she wouldn’t stop I actually went into the yard and began to tell her off with language that I had only heard in the movies, the R rated ones. Even as the words were spewing from my mouth I was thinking in the back of mind that I didn’t know I could talk like that. When I finished my verbal assault I retreated back into my apartment. Then the unthinkable happened, Jackie was ringing my door bell. She had never even been to the laundry room, and now she was at my doorstep. I screamed for her to leave, but she kept ringing and ringing and finally I grabbed a golf club out of Rich’s bag to threaten her with, but when I yanked the door open, and swung it she was too close and I clipped her. I was shocked, she was shocked, and I slammed the door.

It was quiet for about 20 minutes, and then I heard the footsteps above me in her apartment. It could only be one thing, COPS. She had called the cops. I was a NYC school public teacher, that would be the end of my career. When the COPS came down stairs and rang my doorbell, I hid under the blankets, and for the first time ever, the dog did not bark when the bell rang. They went back up stairs and returned 5 minutes later, and still the dog remained thankfully silent. They must have assumed I took the took the dog out, and never came back. I slunk around the building for the next two months until we moved to another borough, and I could start over fresh.

Yes, I was “That Crazy Neighbor Lady”.