Kindle Edition
Category:
Family
Publisher: Amazon
ISBN-10: B01JFD4TV8
Type: Fiction
Pages: 168
Coming to grips with the new neighbors and a crazy phobia like you've never seen before. Funny story about getting to know we are all the same just a little different.
Excerpt
Retirement isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I spend most of my time sitting on my front porch counting cars and yelling at the newspaper boy. He’s not a bad kid; it’s just that he can’t seem to hit my front porch with the paper. I have, mind you, on more than one occasion spent most of my morning searching around the yard for the paper, only to find it either in my wife’s rose bushes or on the garage roof. I have gone as far as demonstrating the art of paper tossing to the young lad; either he is dumb as a box of rocks or he doesn’t like me. I am of the mind that he just doesn’t like me. Can’t please everyone, I guess.
After thirty-six years of living in the same house, you get to know your neighbors, pretty well almost too well, which can be a problem. I have seen perhaps as many as two dozen families move from this block and move to this block over the course of three and a half generations. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for the family that moved in next-door a while back and neither was my wife.
You’d figure after thirty-eight years of being married to the same woman, I ought to know her by now. Even after this long stretch, she still comes up with a surprise or two.
Saturday mornings are pretty uneventful around here, with the exception of a stray dog wandering in the front yard to lay claim to my wife’s rose bushes, marking out his territory in ways that only a dog can. The occasional door-to-door salesman or saleswoman-this being the twenty first century-drops by. Avon lady and Jehovah Witness pretty much rounds off the list of doorknockers these days.
We don’t get the fuller brush man anymore, and the Carnation people stopped delivering milk some twenty years ago. My wife has turned the silver milk box into a planter for her prized Carnations of all things.
I still see the Schwan’s man occasionally driving down the block in his big yellow refrigerated truck. I wave, he waves back and that’s about it. Being my wife and I are both drawing off retirement and social security, which don’t amount to a hill of beans these days? The Schwan’s man is one of those luxuries best reserved for special occasions. Such as births, deaths and when our two children come to visit-which occurs about as often as one of our friends die, since everyone my wife and I have ever known, has pretty much kicked the bucket. Which means Jenny and Artie don’t come around much at all?
They’ll pop in every now and then, to bring the grandchildren by, Jenny’s two boys from her first marriage and Arti’s three girls from his current wife, a mystery woman whose name my wife enjoys pretending that she can’t remember.
Arti shrugs it off every time his wife and he comes over to visit; Betty that’s my wife‘s name. My wife goes through her little acting-more annoying than anything-asking her “ What did you say your name was,” which is the first sign perhaps she doesn’t like Arti’s wife. Can’t please everyone I guess.
Nevertheless, the grandchildren are the apples of Betty’s eyes. It wouldn’t matter if Jenny had married King Kong or Arti the invisible woman, which would be fine by my wife. Children are children for better or worse. Their interest is first and foremost as any grandparent will testify to.
Jenny and Arti don’t come around as often as we would like. Moreover, every time I see the grand children, it seems they have added another foot and twenty years of knowledge.
Happens children grow up, get married, and life goes on. I wonder sometimes if this is what is meant by the legacy of one’s life. If this is not truly the purpose of immortality: to see your children through the eyes of their children. I just wish Arti and Jenny would come around a little bit more. I can’t say I blame them; they both have settled for a plastic world and a thirty-year mortgage.
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