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.