Knit Sisters

Truth be known, I loathe Robert Frost. Something there is that does not love a dour, ungenerous New England poet.

Quite. I must say, among the American poets, I prefer Whitman. His lanky, muscular line provides the perfect accompaniment to gnawing the end off of a cow femur.

Nonetheless, I keep thinking of his mean-spirited “Mending Wall,” in which the narrator’s beleagured neighbor, the one who keeps saying, “Good fences make good neighbors,” is immortalized forever as the schlemiel who just keeps thoughtlessly mending the stone wall every spring and saying the same unexamined thing over and over because he thinks it’s clever.

As opposed to the narrator, who questions what the point of the wall is, but likewise keeps mending the stone wall every spring.

My question to you is, who’s the bigger jerk?

But lately I’ve started to think that I too am an old-stone savage. For a year and a half, we lived on the first floor of our three-story house without neighbors on the second floor. The house was very cold in the winter and there were drug dealers living on the third floor, yes, but it was very quiet. The drug dealers only popped around a couple of times a week and they pretty much sidled into the house, dropped things off, picked things up, and headed out to points unknown where there was a little cash-o-la to be made in illegal commodities. I liked to think of them as “young entrepreneurs.”

We were just one big, happy, dysfunctional, criminally-inclined family.

Until the people on the second floor moved in. One month later, the drug dealers cleared out, apparently having come to regard the space as “no longer suitable to their business needs” now that there was someone immediately downstairs to monitor their comings and goings.

A mere two months later, Zeno and the rest of the Mad Dog household were plunged into mourning for our oil-dripping, petrochemically-hazardous derelict truck, which “the new people” had insisted, through an enraging combination of uncontestable and coolly rational arguments, on having towed away.

You can see as well as I where this is going.

First they came for the drug dealers,
but I did not speak up because I was not a drug dealer.
Then they came for the derelict truck,
but I did not speak up because I was not a derelict truck…

The awful part about all this is that they are perfectly nice people. They love my dog, they are civilized, they don’t throw loud parties, they only cook aromatic foods about once a week, and they have politically-correct bumper stickers on their cars indicating their love of the Goddess and vegetable-oil-powered vehicles and their hatred of George Bush and U.S. imperialism.

And yet, I hate it when I’m trying to go to sleep and I can hear them walking around upstairs, which they seem to do at all hours of the day and night. Can you imagine? People thinking that it is “okay” to walk around their own apartment? I mean, how inconsiderate can you get?

Yeah, I know this is my problem.

But I swear their cat wears combat boots. Thud, thud, thud, thud, meow!

The lastest development is that our neighbors have proposed having tea together to “chat about the house.” Something there is that doesn’t love a chat. (Something there is that doesn’t love le chat, either, but that’s another matter altogether.)

I think perhaps in response I will send a note saying, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and leave it at that.

Progress on “Time Out of Mind”:

I realize this is a bit like watching the grass grow. Humor me, will you?

The front proceeds…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Heavy sweaters, Time out of mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.