It has been a long time since I’ve been awake, fully dressed, and socializing outside my house after midnight on a Friday night.
There were crowds of people.
There was booze.
The cops even showed up.
The next morning – which came too quickly and too brightly – found me collecting beer cans and liquor bottles that I then knotted into a grocery bag and left on the porch of the new neighbor who threw a house party.
I was not excited about being up until 2:30am monitoring the activity of the 75-100 “youths” who found their way to our dead-end street Friday night. Dead-end as in “no outlet.” Dead-end as in “no through traffic.” Dead-end as in “we notice things.”
Because this is OUR neighborhood.
We notice when the traffic exponentially increases after 11pm. We notice when those cars line both sides of the street and turn around on lawns. We notice the yelled obscenities and smoking tires of a screeching peel-out.
Listen, kids, go ahead and be young and have a good time. But keep in mind that when your epic good time explodes out of control outside our houses, we will shut you down.
Because this is OUR neighborhood.
We are working people, families with kids, and retirees. We mow our lawns, and sometimes our neighbor’s lawn if it needs cutting and we know that they’ve been busy with an ill relative.
We clear snow from our driveway, a neighbor’s driveway, and then also the sidewalk so when our neighbors are out walking their dogs they’ll have an easier time.
We live on small building lots, so we let the neighborhood kids play their games over two or three front yards so they have enough space. If we run low on charcoal or lighter fluid for the grill, a neighbor will have it to give.
So when the party guests at your soiree are rowdy enough in the street to wake a seven year old girl and send her scared and crying to her parents’ bedroom, we don’t like it.
And when two more of your party guests are arrested on the street below the bedroom window of another child, we don’t like it.
We will call the police and we will put on our coats and come outside to watch you. We want you to see us watching you, and then we will take pictures of the cars we don’t recognize lining the streets. We even say a cheerful “good evening” to your (bewildered) party guests – just so they know that inside all these houses are real people.
Because this is OUR neighborhood.
And the next morning, I will collect the empties that your party guests seem to have lost. I pick up beer cans from the front yard of a young couple who are raising a toddler, and who I think might practice a religion that teaches abstinence from alcohol. I pick up a liquor bottle from the front yard of a retiree who drives to the nursing home every day to visit his wife. I pick up more cans from the yard of someone I don’t know at all, except that I know they keep their yard immaculate.
Because this is OUR neighborhood.
You just moved in this winter and soon it will become your neighborhood, too. We haven’t met yet, but when we do, I’ll say:
“Welcome to the neighborhood. It’s a nice place to live and we hope you like it here.”
The rest of us like it a lot.
