Wanted: really tall fence

Walking the dog one day, we came upon a familiar expansive corner lot.  In our town, this is exceedingly rare and because our house is on a postage-sized lot, we often find ourselves experiencing yard-envy as we stroll along with the pup.  Yard-envy is a close cousin of porch envy, with which I am also afflicted.  But on this particular day, B wondered out loud to me, "Wouldn't it be great to have  that yard and build a 15 foot high fence all around it?"  My initial thought was, "well, that's not very neighborly" but then I realized.  It would be AWESOME.

We are town-dwellers, which affords many conveniences, lots of dog friends to say hello to, and the joys of wind-blown trash in your fence pickets.  Because of our postage-sized lot, we have great views of our neighbors' breakfast table from our second floor landing and they of my naked walk to the shower while they eat their oatmeal.  I have every faith that we are each dutifully avoiding gazing at the scenery in the morning.  This is the foundation of neighborly behavior.  Like George Constanza and his pigeons, there is a contract.  When it fails, we wish we were country dwellers.

I'm prompted to write on this particular topic because as I type, I can see through my window to the neighbor's driveway 3 doors down where a car sits running with the radio blasting some rage metal loud enough that it could be emanating from my own ipod. I think we could all agree this is too loud.  Where is the driver?  He has disappeared inside the house, which is dark and empty of it's owners.  He is gone a long time.  If he is attempting to break & enter, perhaps subjecting the entire neighborhood to his music is not the way to go.  At the very least, he has a very high estimation of his taste in music and a great sense of charity to share it with all of us in this way.

When I was in my 20s and grundge was in its heyday, I loved the movie Singles.  That apartment building, all those 20 somethings making their way in the world and sharing their angst with each other was a dream.  I mean, Campbell Scott.  Right?  I wanted neighbors like that.  A perfect neighbor idyll. Never a bored or lonely moment. The constant possibility of fun breaking out.  I almost had that for a few months when I was single in Portland, living below a young couple who would invite me up for homemade Pad Thai and out for overpriced drinks in a martini bar.  They moved and the new neighbors would have strangers over for interminable noisy sex above my bed and then tromp around in wooden shoes until 3 am. Two things have come to light for me since then.  For one, movies aren't real life.  And two, I just want some peace and quiet.

When we were first engaged and newly moved to our town, we were still renters in an apartment not meant to be an apartment.  This means that what barely passed for a ceiling was basically floor joists and some thin sheet rock separating us from the ragtime piano performances and nightly musical chairs of our charming upstairs neighbors.  Their teenage son was apparently a disciple of Parkour, jumping from the fifth stair to the floor without fail.  B took to concocting elaborate revenge schemes involving spoiled milk and cold cuts left to ripen beneath their stoop.  We're not proud of it.  But this is what happens when you're helplessly at the mercy of boorish neighbors who think they're the only people on the planet.  

B & I are quiet people generally.  We like music and reading and mellowness.  We have the occasional dinner guest or poker game but generally we're not whooping it up.  B's Thom Yorke impersonations are operatic in the heat of summer with the windows open, but we have to do something to drown out the barking dogs and monster trucks idling in the mud yard across the street.  Overall, we are uber-conscious of the space we occupy in the neighborhood- both in the auditory and spacial realms.  We try to be friendly without being intrusive and pick up our dog poo religiously.

And so these violations of the neighbor contract, of which consideration is central, vex us.  How can the details of this contract, so obvious to us, elude others?  But life is full of things you can't control.  The serenity prayer wasn't written for nothing.  And so what are we left to do?  Stewing in our judgment and chagrin won't do.  To be honest, we love our little town and our neighborhood which is quite friendly overall, especially the folks down the street who always wave from their porch. With them, there's just the small matter of my porch envy to deal with.

So, we coach each other to just let it go.  Live and let live.  Different strokes and all that.  Mostly, B coaches me, living in quiet dread of the day I follow through on my threats to call the landlord about the antics across the street.  What I haven't told him is how when I was a teenage babysitter, I would call the mom of my regular gig at the bar if she wasn't home within 15 minutes of her stated return time.  I know how it must have made me look.  Call it what you will- assertiveness or anxiety or being just plain uptight.  B would call it trouble and being that kind of neighbor is maybe as bad as leaving your dogs to howl alone in anxiety all night long, keeping the whole damn neighborhood awake.  Well, maybe not quite as bad, but still that's not the kind of neighbor (or person, for that matter) I want to be, in the end.  I don't want to be that grouchy lady shaking her fist in her doorway.  I want to be about peace and light.  And maybe have a sense of humor about all these little annoyances, which don't amount to much, afterall.  So I let B talk me down in the interest of peace on the street.  But I'm thinking about that fence.