For a Brief Instant, I Almost Got a Warm, Fuzzy Feeling

A couple Saturdays ago, for 90 minutes, I didn't hate our neighborhood.

A helicopter was hovering just past the woods that border our subdivision. Our best guess was that they were filming whatever was going on over at the Whitewater Center. It was interesting, but hardly cause for alarm.

The neighborhood kids, however, were pretty wound up. Particularly the little boys, who whizzed around on their bikes trying to get a better view of the hovering aircraft. The best view could be had from the sidewalk next to and in front of our house, which led to a cluster of kids hanging around my mailbox. It also meant I got to hear all their theories on what the helicopter was doing there.

"Man, it's the cops. They lookin' for somebody. I'm out."

"I heard a horse from the stables back there got loose. It's running around in the woods and they're trying to catch it. They're gonna shoot it, I think."

"Somebody said a prisoner got loose. He was cleanin' up the highway and he escaped. He murdered a bunch of people. He's gonna get us."

"Maybe it's a tiger or something. Maybe a truck with animals in it crashed on the highway and now they have to find all the animals in the woods."

I found all this amusing and somewhat charming, which is a refreshing change from the stress and irritation I usually feel when I think about where we live. For a few minutes, it was a neighborhood I wouldn't mind staying in for a few more years, instead of one I can't wait to move out of.

The kids gradually lost interested and drifted away. The rotten kid from next door went back to throwing rocks at cars and his friends. Even though we were standing in front of our house, at the end of the driveway, I could hear teenagers screaming "Fuck you motherfucker, that was my fuckin' shot, you fuckin' motherfucker! FUUUUUCCCKKKK!!"  as they played basketball on the court in the park behind our house.

Ahhh, I thought. Back to normal.

Snapshots: Early April 2010

Ryan and I watched the news after Castle on Monday night.  As we viewed a story about the school district pretty much looking down its nose at parent efforts to prevent another round of teacher layoffs, we exchanged grim looks. Between the way the district handled last year's cuts (board member Kaye McGarry said they were “unprofessional, sloppy and unfair,” which I heartily agree with), the way they're handling it this year, and the way they're treating angry parents, it's pretty clear our daughter would be better off getting her education elsewhere. Although the where part of that equation is a big fat question mark for us.

12:30 on a Tuesday afternoon: my almost-three-year-old daughter roams the house tossing empty plastic Easter eggs in her wake, and for some reason she is not wearing any pants.

We've started watching Battlestar Galactica. I watched the original series as a kid, and adored it in all its cheesy glory.  Since we are HUGE Firefly fans (Piper came thisclose to being named Inara), BSG pushes all the right buttons for us. It's so, so good.  I think I can say that you might like it even if you're "not a sci-fi kind of person." It's not really about that; the focus is on the huge upheaval of a civilization re-making itself as a species fights for survival. Of course, there are some kick-ass space battles in there too. 

We got a new neighbor across the street. The truck mysteriously appeared in the driveway Sunday morning, and I spent the next several days running to the windows at the front of the house whenever I heard a noise outside. I got a little obsessed, if you want to know the truth. I was anxious to see who was going to move in; the former occupants were nice, if occasionally a bit crazy. I was sad to see them go, but I understood their reasons. They just couldn't take the neighborhood any more. We were fervently hoping somebody more like us would take their place, instead of another troop like we have next door, where the kids pretty much run wild (and LOUD) at all hours, there's a revolving parade of shady-looking dudes passing through, rap music blares at all hours, and the mother never seems to be around. We crossed our fingers and we watched. My husband managed only one glimpse of somebody going into the house, in two days of avid watching, and I didn't see anybody. Cars and moving trucks would appear and disappear like magic, with no apparent people piloting them. Last night I was getting ready to take our trash to the curb when my husband came into the kitchen and said, "Hey, she's out there, if you hurry and grab the trash you can meet her." I threw on some flip-flops, grabbed our two-wheeled trash container and our recycling bin, and dashed for the front yard. My haste was rewarded, and I talked to our new neighbor for a couple of minutes. She's about our age, I think, and said she works in the school system, which is a promising start. I'm hoping that we can be friends, because I would really like a neighbor-friend. I'm sick of all the closed doors and half-hearted waves in our neighborhood.

On a lighter note, I will leave you with this photo of our cat Ellie, who has some sort of allergy issue and has to wear the Cone of Shame so she will stop pulling her hair out:

 

She is not pleased.

Moral Fiber

So, the second part of Cookie Girl's visit involves more moral dilemmas (and moral failings) on my part: After we established that we would not be ordering cookies without more information, it was getting late. It was past dinner time; the meal I had been working on when she rang the doorbell was cooling in its pans on the stove. I now faced another problem: either invite her to dinner, or find a way to shoo her out the door. I told her it was 7:00, and asked her when her mother told her to be home.

"Oh, she didn't give me a time," came the sunny, cheery answer. "She never tells me when I have to be back. She never tells me when to come home."

She could have been fibbing, of course, but since she had previously spent almost seven hours at our house and nobody came looking for her, I doubted it. I didn't think this kid had much in the way of adult supervision. I wanted to be a good person, but I didn't exactly want to invite her to dinner. I tried to tell myself it was because we didn't have enough to go around or she might have food allergies, but really it was because I wasn't sure if I could handle this kid. She's not my kid, so I couldn't exactly put her in the corner if she refused to eat her nutritious meal and asked for more candy, you know? It already makes me mad when my own kid won't eat what I cook and demands other things; how would I handle it if someone else's child did it to me? She'd already gotten a Popsicle and a handful of the mints she saw in a kitchen drawer and then pretended not to know about but specifically asked for. I didn't think she'd be the kind to eat all her vegetables without a fight, and something told me they weren't big on quiet family dinners at her house.

It was also, I am somewhat ashamed to admit, because I didn't want to encourage her.

When I was growing up, my family were always the ones who had extra kids around. My parents fed everybody who showed up at our door, no matter how little we had. We never worried about bringing extra people home or inviting them to dinner. Our friends with less-than-stellar home lives always had a haven at our house; day or night, if someone needed a place to go, they could come to us. My parents treated everybody like their own kids, be it hugs or curfews that needed handing out. And I really do believe that they helped a lot of the kids who hung around. Some of those kids, now grown (and some with kids of their own!) will tell you that for themselves.

I always thought that I possessed this generosity of body and spirit. I thought that I had taken to heart their lessons about helping people because it is the right thing to do. But standing in my kitchen, setting the burners to low in an attempt to re-heat the dinner I'd spent 45 minutes cooking earlier, I knew I had not. Because I didn't want this kid. I didn't want to feed her, and have her show up at my door every other day expecting to be fed, the way she now zooms in and asks for treats because of the one time I gave her banana bread and Capri-Sun. I wanted to pretend that we could be a kind presence in her life, stepping in for her mostly-absentee parents, providing a different perspective and a little direction. I knew the reality would simply involve her showing up at our door randomly asking for cake and Kool-Aid, dragging out all Piper's toys, and forgetting to say thank-you.

And I couldn't do it.

I couldn't invite this kid to dinner, couldn't watch her pass up the healthy foods that I work so hard to make and even harder to get Piper to eat. I couldn't invite her in to occupy my daughter's made-for-tiny-kids furniture and possibly break it in the process; I couldn't watch her boss my kid around and eye Piper's toys with envy. I was not at all the good person I wanted to be, ready and willing to feed and entertain some stranger's child just because my daughter didn't mind (and maybe even liked) playing with her.

I gave them a 30-minute time limit and let them keep playing. It was 7:45 when I finally got the little girl convinced that Piper needed to eat dinner and go to bed. I wondered again where this girls parents were, that she could be in someone else's home at nearly 8:00 on a school night and nobody would come looking for her, or apparently even expect her to be home.

I re-warmed the dinner, and we ate quietly. I felt a pang of guilt with every bite I took, knowing I should've invited her to to stay. I guess I'm pretty far from the good person I want to be, because despite the guilt, a teeny tiny part of me was glad I wouldn't have to share my bacon.

Guilt-Chip Cookies

There's a little girl in our neighborhood who loves Piper. This is great, except this girl is six years old and seems to think of Piper as an overgrown baby doll. She tries to pick her up and haul her around, and while Piper is remarkably tolerant of her attentions, it makes me uneasy to have her staggering around carrying my kid, dangerously close to dropping her on the massive anthills and upthrust tree roots that populate the dirt around here.

This little girl also likes to hang out and play with Piper...which is again, great, except that this means she takes Piper's toys right out of her hands and breaks them and bosses Piper around. She pesters us to bring more and more toys out into the yard. She climbs, sits, and swings on Piper's built-for-kids-under-3-years-old-or-less-than-45-lbs swing set. I wince and try to gently tell her that it's built for little kids, as the plastic swing sags and its support beams start to buckle. The little girl sometimes complies, but a lot of the time, she tells me "No, it's okay, see?" and swings harder, her butt in the swing hovering three inches off the ground. The whole swing set rocks and tips and thumps with every movement.

She is constantly asking for food, candy, or any other consumables she thinks I may have around. I gave out juice boxes and banana bread one day for helping us in the yard when she, her sister, and some other neighborhood kids helped us bury Chick and ever since then she asks for more every time she comes over. It's not a casual request, either; she peers around the back door and scans the kitchen counters for signs of recent baking. If I tell her no, I don't have any today, she asks "Well, do you have something else?" She asks for a drink and I give her water. She looks disdainfully at the plastic cup and says "Don't you have any juice?" If I tell her not today, she will try to look into the refrigerator to prove me wrong.

This little girl came over one day last week selling cookies. Cookie dough, to be more specific, one of those godawful fundraiser things that have kids hawking crap nobody needs to make pennies per item for their school. I wanted to help her out; I really did. But she came to our door first asking if Piper could come out and play, and then absently asked us if we wanted to buy some cookies. We said we'd take a look and she invited herself inside. Piper was finishing up a Popsicle, and the little neighborhood girl asked for one (and when she'd finished it, another). We gave her a Popsicle and while we looked over her sales materials, she started playing with Piper.

She had handed us a three-page brochure and order form for frozen cookie dough which cost $14 or $16 per box. That is a lot of cash for us to be dropping on cookies sold by six-year-olds, and I started to get a sinking feeling. Closer inspection revealed that the envelope into which we were supposed to place our form of payment had no information on it. There were merely blank lines where her school, classroom, and teacher's name should've been written. In fact, all the lines on everything were blank, except for the first line of the order form where someone had half-filled in an order and then crossed it out. The only other sheet she had handed us was a glossy one-page flyer showing all the really! great! prizes! a kid could get if they sold enough cookie dough to feed Western Europe for a year.

We asked her what school she went to, and she told us the name, which was unsurprisingly the school right up the road. When quizzed about her teacher's name, she mumbled something and went back to playing. We asked her when we'd get the cookie dough - there was absolutely nothing on any of the materials about when this "gourmet" cookie dough would arrive - and she said we had to pick it up. We asked her when and where and she said "I think at the school sometime...I don't really know." She couldn't tell us anything else about the cookie sale.

I had been mentally berating the person who had started an order and then crossed out their name, but suddenly I understood their position very well. I did not particularly want to turn this girl loose with a check or cash which may or may not make it to the teacher, for some cookies which may or may not ever arrive, which we might have to possibly go pick up "sometime" from some part of her school.

Eventually we told her to have her teacher fill out the envelope with the correct info or give her an information sheet so we'd know what to do, then bring it to us and we would order cookies. By now I had spent 45 minutes agonizing over this terrible moral dilemma and feeling like an ass for not buying any cookies. The little girl, who didn't seem to care if we bought 50 cases of cookies or none at all, had spent the time nosing around our house, playing with Piper, and rifling through our kitchen drawers looking for candy.

She got a handful of starlight mints, and I ended the day feeling as though I needed to go to confession for not buying some overpriced cookie dough.