Miss Roberts's Neighborhood

“She doesn’t like strangers,” I say, embarrassed, partially because Koda does like strangers. She likes almost everyone.

The stranger eyed my sliding glass door, the only thing between himself and the seemingly ferocious boxer dog and yellow lab.

I knocked on the glass, “Koda!”

It’s always Koda that causes the ruckus. I could hear Sonnie’s contentment as she lay down and crunched on her dog food. She’d tired of the situation and moved along with lunch. It takes everything short of a natural disaster to upset Sonnie.

Koda pounced against the glass again. Better to instill fear in people who shouldn’t be in my house for long, I supposed. Still, it was embarrassing to shout conversation over her angry barking. I looked like a parent who couldn’t control her children.

Dogs are supposed to soften their defenses once they realize that their owner is no longer in danger, right? Never mind that animals, unlike humans, don’t have the ability to reason; logic means nothing to them. If Koda were able to reason, in theory, when she met the seven-foot-tall Denzel Washington that fixed my internet today, she would’ve assessed the situation and gotten comfortable, seeing that there was indeed, no danger at hand. The man was reaching for the bad splitter that was keeping me from my beloved internet. He was at no point, reaching to do harm to anything around him. Through the entire transaction, the testing of the Internet, the unhooking of the Internet, the removing of the splitter, the re-hooking of the internet, and my thanking him at the door, Koda’s barking made up the soundtrack.

Admittedly, when I pull into my neighborhood, I fight the urge to sing the Weeds theme song, “…little boxes all the same…”. Sometimes I give in to the urge and belt it out as I round corners at the whopping twenty-five mile per hour speed limit. The houses are cookie-cutter identical, yet the neighbors within them are not.

I’ve only met two of my neighbors. One, an older woman wholives on the corner, walks two Maltese, identical miniature balls of white cotton, and pushes an empty blue stroller for half of her daily walk. On her return journey, the dogs ride side-by-side in the stroller. The woman can’t walk more than two blocks roundtrip, but apparently the fluffy little dogs can’t handle the trip all on their own. Another neighbor with whom I’ve shared a moment lives right next door. One night, I was talking on my phone and walking toward the mailbox. In a moment, the neighbor’s garage door opened and the truck within honked in response to its remote. I glanced at the truck but was distracted by the sixty-something-year old man standing in the garage. His tighty-whiteys glowed in the light of the garage door opener. The man waved enthusiastically.

In response to both neighbors, I simply pretended that everything was normal and raised my hand in reply. Outside of these interactions, I’m not friendly with my neighbors. You’d think, that because our houses are identical but reversed, my neighbors would care a bit about my well-being. As we answered everything in the early ‘90s, NOT.

Walt’s friend Noah once left his motorcycle in our garage and promised to retrieve it at a later date. No one was home, so Noah got the motorcycle on his own.

He removed the screen from the kitchen window and climbed into the house. He opened the garage and moved his motorcycle onto the driveway. He went inside and closed and locked the kitchen window. Lastly, he exited through the garage, jumping over the door sensor and leaving the house just as he’d found it. Not a single neighbor brought this to our attention. We were only aware of the motorcycle’s disappearance because Noah told Walt the next day.

Fast-forward six months and two more housemates.

Angelo moved in on Monday. His stuff has been here all summer, but he and his dog arrived to a locked house after a fourteen-hour road trip. I was in class and Angelo’s key was rubber-banded to his bedroom doorknob because I thought I’d beat him home. I sent him a message that I’d be home around 9:30. He could meet me on campus and take my key, or he could just wait. He informed me less than ten minutes later that he’d broken in. Neighbors could have cared less. No neighborhood policemen, not even a “citizen on patrol” car was sent our way.

I’d spent all summer in Walt’s absence assuring myself that any noise in the night was simply our over-worked air conditioner filter, clanking against its filthy frame. I’d religiously locked every door and window nightly so I could lie in bed and not worry about anything once I locked my bedroom door. Angelo’s break-in destroyed my sense of security.

I guess that all I can hope is that any intruders I may encounter resemble Denzel Washington, otherwise, my dogs won’t even bark.

Lessons at the Fairgrounds

I don’t have thick skin; I never have. I don’t apply for jobs that require pushy sales or require dealing with copious amounts of rejection. I just don’t deal well. And, I have far too much time to dream up wonderfully multi-purpose comebacks. I've been taking everything personally lately, so I give you, for the first time ever in print, Karly’s Restore-Your- Faith-in-Humanity Story.

At a very young age, Kelsy and I discovered that our parents would do anything for us. We especially capitalized on the fact that they didn’t mind carrying their sleeping children into the house from any one of the family Suburbans that we inhabited over the course of our childhood. Fake sleeping is a valuable skill; it must be learned. We learned it well. Small for her age, Kelsy milked the technique and used it years beyond my fake-sleeping bit’s shelf life.

I was ten-ish and Kelsy was six-ish that particularly fateful day. Kelsy was being piggybacked around the Pratt County Fairgrounds because she forgot her shoes at home. (Even the pre-tornado fairground was not a safe place for bare feet.) As we piggybacked our way to the makeshift county extension office, spirits among us were low.

I was learning a lesson about loss and responsibility. Mom was speaking gently but purposefully, empathizing for my loss but warning that I may never see my 4-H earnings again. 4-H earnings, besides my allowance paid weekly in beanie babies, were my only income. I made money based on everything from my highest prizes, blue ribbons on sequin horses and rocks painted like ballet shoes, to participation ribbons for my cooking. Even the snake-shaped shortcake with strawberry eyes, whose sugar-laced intestines were accidentally laced with salt, earned me a few dollars that year.

I’d organized and counted my cash obsessively. I ordered the bills so that the smaller ones were on top, working their way up to twenties. Then I’d sandwiched the twenties between the lower bills, the ones and fives guarding their superiors from outsiders. To a ten-year old, one hundred fifty-six dollars was a fortune. (At twenty-three, one hundred fifty-six dollars is still a fortune.) While visiting the livestock and ogling the year’s ride selection, my fortune had gone missing. Purses were far too girly for my tomboy overalls, and the envelope containing my perfectly ordered cash was an ill fit for my pocket.

“It could be gone, Karlybelle. So you can’t be too upset okay?”

“Okay,” I’d mumbled.

“We have to take care of our things,” mom said.

Mom nudged me forward. I lost the money, so I needed to ask if anyone had found it.

“Has anyone turned in some money in an envelope?” I asked.

The woman smiled at us, “Can you describe the envelope, sweetie?”

I launched into my description, barely breathing, “The flap was blue and it had white paw prints on it and it had money in it.”

“How much money?” she asked.

“One hundred and fifty-six dollars.” I was mid-way through describing my hand-writing and my dollar sign with one line- not two- when I was interrupted.

She pulled my blue-flapped envelope from a drawer in her desk.

I climbed into the very back seat of the Suburban and Kelsy’s “forgotten” shoes shifted beneath my feet. I ordered and reordered my one hundred fifty-six dollars. Someone had found- and returned- every last dollar of a ten-year-old girl’s sequined-horse income.

Answers

I’ve been working the farmers’ market booth for the college every other weekend this summer. Koda, my boxer dog, has become the official alumni booth dog.

I endure the jokes, “Is she an alumni?” Although I did take her to a class or two during my undergraduate program, she is not an alumni.

“Is she a current student?” Yes, yes she is. Here’s a schedule, she’s taking every class.

And, lastly, people walk up to her and looking at me briefly, they say, “We have boxers.” I’ve figured out that this is code for: I’m going to crouch down now and let your dog kiss me on the mouth for an uncomfortably extended amount of time, but don’t worry- we have boxers.

I’ve fielded every imaginable question about the college. Yes, we have six athletic teams. No, we don’t have a football team, but the town has a rugby team. Yes, the college is forty years old but looks like it’s much younger. No, there are no dead people buried on campus. (The last question was from my favorite tour to date. High school students tend to look at me as a person who is only a couple years older than themselves. What could I possibly know? Middle school students, however, look at me like I’m wearing a cape and could show them my superhero talents at any moment. The last question was from a middle school tour.)

The questions that I could have never been prepared to answer in rapid succession pertaining to Koda were, “How old is she?”

“She’s almost three.”

“Is she smart?”

Well, she has mud stuck in her jowls and she’s missing a tooth because she enjoys carrying rocks around in her mouth. I have to feed her because she has no thumbs, and when she runs out of water, she carries her water bowl around until I fill it.

The apology followed shortly after, the woman realized that I didn't have a simple answer for her. She explained that she was thinking about getting a boxer and wondered if they were smart.

To me, this was akin to walking up to a mom pushing a stroller and saying, “Shouldn’t that kid be able to walk by now? Oh, and she has spitup on her face, is that normal? I’m just asking because I’m thinking of procreating one day and I wanted to make sure that kids are fully self-reliant creatures before I embark on that journey.”

Leaving the farmers' market yesterday, I stopped to pick up a couple of rawhides for the dogs. Koda worked hard that morning, gently kissing two-foot-tall kids and gratefully accepting praise from old women who’d raised boxers their entire lives; she deserved a treat. And, Sonnie, my yellow lab, deserved a treat just because.

Although I got each of them a rawhide, they decided that they needed to fight over the one that was originally Sonnie’s. After lying on her untouched rawhide for a few minutes, Koda planned her attack on Sonnie’s half-chewed rawhide. Her planning never really worked to her benefit, but she couldn’t be accused of not trying.

They chased each other around the house, leaving trails of slobber down one another’s backs and necks.

Finally, Koda emerged as the winner, soggy rawhide in mouth. She barreled onto the couch and settled next to me. Sonnie huffed as she approached. The rawhide rested between Koda’s front paws, mere inches from Sonnie’s yellow snout.

Koda released a low growl and a bout of trademark boxer gas. Sonnie rocked her head back in retreat.

I buried my face in the collar of my shirt, laughing and plugging my nose.

As Koda crunched away on her rawhide trophy, I wondered how I hadn’t immediately said, “Yes, Koda is a genius,” to the stranger at the farmers’ market.