neighbors | neighbors
May.04.2013
Our friend and neighbor, Walt, has gone into hospital.
Walt is one of those casual special people masquerading among us common mortals, a tireless master gardener, inveterate reader, supportive husband and father and general sweet guy. Complaining of joint issues and pain, he was...
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Mar.27.2013
I've been a bit quiet for a few days because along with disaproving of the vast quantity of my possessions the nice realtor lady thought that I ought to get a structural engineer to look at the crack in one of my retaining walls, my house is built into a hill, more about that in a jiffy, and the...
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Mar.06.2013
We have new neighbors in back of us. We haven't met them yet, but we've seen the tops of their heads from our yards, and we've heard their dog at all times of the day and night. We've watched their children aim for clouds on their swings, and marked time by the step-by-step erection of a playhouse...
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Feb.11.2013
"Actually, this isn't half as bad as I thought it would be," I said, staring out of the window at the empty road the stretched out before us. Then, I shivered.
Corb smiled, behind the wheel. "You'll have to excuse Ted, Linda. He's a bit of a nervous passenger."
"Especially during blizzards,"...
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Oct.23.2012
I didn't know her first name. Everybody called her Mrs. Hudson.
Still, I knew her more intimately than many of my closest friends. I saw her at her most vulnerable. An elderly woman of 88, her body failing quickly from aggressive breast cancer. I lifted her...
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Oct.02.2012
Why do people turn on their neighbors? Why do friends become enemies? Why do whole populations who have lived peacefully together try to destroy each other? Why does life turn into a terrible game of Them and Us?
Modern history is littered with examples of one...
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Aug.07.2012
Ah, the neighbor got some last night.
Don't know him. Neighbor Wade is off on an adventure involving camping and motorcycles. Been gone a couple weeks. Might have gone down to his native area, Big Sur. A young man is staying in his place. I guess that makes him a house sitter.
In addition to riding...
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Aug.01.2012
"Falling Skies" has a great plot twist: the hunter becomes the hunted. What a clever flip of an the well used paradigm. Wonder why no one has thought of this before?
To which my weary wife replied, "You sound like Walt." Walt is my neighbor. He's like 30 years older. It staggers me that...
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Jul.25.2012
In a fiction seminar I took at Stanford summer school in the early 1980s, the teacher, Chuck Kinder, brought Raymond Carver to class. Carver was well over six feet with the quiet demeanor of a man much smaller. He had just published another story in Esquire and was thoughtfully upbeat...
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Jun.26.2012
I'm not a great neighbor.
Now, I live out in the middle of nowhere, so I don't have a lot of neighbors, but the ones I do have should feel shorted.
I don't look after their house, pick up their mail. I don't keep a suspicious eye on the pest control guy to make sure he's on the up and up......
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