I live in a quietly inaffluent “townhome” community, tucked away in the armpit of I-10 and North Monroe. The triplexes are 1980’s wood frame numbers, constructed on stilts so that they won’t wash off down the heavily wooded slope. When people visit me, they always exclaim, “How the hell did you find this place?”
I think that’s why I chose to buy this townhouse five years ago. I knew my graduate education would be a long haul, and I needed someplace more permanent than a rental. The price was right; I wasn’t afraid of a fixer-upper (in fact, my secret membership in Clan MacGuyver demands it); and I couldn’t resist the slow sleepy way the buildings looked. What really caught me, though, was the view. The back of the house was converted into a sunroom, with paned windows over-looking a grassy backyard and a deep, wooded ravine beyond. I had grown up surrounded by woods. My childhood backyard abutted the pine forest and our gravel road dead-ended into the swamp. All I could think as I gazed out of those sunroom windows, over the yard, and out into the ravine was: home.
It didn’t help my more critical functions, either, that my grandmother’s house in Port Huron had been a collection of sunrooms just like the one I now found myself standing in. There was almost no chance in hell I was getting out of buying the place once I walked into that room, no matter how my head screamed: It needs so much work! It’s old! There are feral cats everywhere! The driveway looks like it was paved by a crew of drunken mental patients!
I didn’t listen; I couldn’t listen. With the help of my family, I bought it; and with the help of family and many many others, I turned it into my home.
Of course, this was after many more dollars and countless droplets of sweat and tears. But, now, I have it made.
According to people like my father, on the other hand, I live in a slum. He does have a point. My neighborhood can certainly be described as…colorful. Quiet, yes, but not without the occasional dramatic – or revolting – episode. Some of the residents are downright creative about it. For example, the couple up the hill started burning their trash in the backyard when they couldn’t make the garbage payments anymore. I remember when I first drove by and glanced in their backyard at the burn pile, thinking, “Oh, how nice…having a little bonfire.” Day after day, however, when I began to notice half-melted laundry bottles and wads of tinfoil in the heap, reality dawned.
Last year, the excitement was a neighborhood drug dealer named Juan [name changed to protect the guilty] and his family. They lived at the opposite end of my building. All year, we watched the cheapest of Tallahassee’s addicts come and go. My neighbor, Don, who keeps strange hours as a courier service, regaled me weekly with stories about their comings and goings and rode the Tallahassee Police Department into a lather trying to get them to stage a bust. I suppose the TPD figured that since our dealing neighbors had yet to threaten anyone’s life, they were free to stake them out for as long as they liked, “gathering evidence” at their leisure. So they claimed. Anyway, that excitement ended rather anticlimactically one day as I finished the final chapter of my dissertation…
Text from Don: “What R U Doing still in Ur house??? Get out here! The neighbors r being BUSTED!”
Me: “Huh! REALLY?”
I glanced up from my computer and directly out my front window. (My desk faces out the large double panes so that I can see what I’m missing as I slave over the keyboard) Directly in front of me, not twenty paces away, crouched a long, fat, black van. I had dismissed the vehicle out of hand earlier as just another crack customer, but this time I noticed there were several interestingly dressed men strolling around. I craned my head to the left, and saw Juan’s sister, Sarah, standing beside her own vehicle… with her hands behind her back. I had just been outside with Pippin not ten minutes ago; how had I missed this?? And now it was all over.
Well, back to the dissertation, I guess. Ho hum.
Every now and then, after that fateful day, I do start to wish for a little excitement. Or, maybe just something to joke about in the driveway with my neighbors besides the parking technique of the latest renter. I get a little nostalgic when I see “Sir Speedy”, the cracked-out homeless man who wanders the length of Tallahassee everyday, like a scarecrow, in search of a fix. One might see him on a given day, panhandling outside a local restaurant. He looks pathetic. But only I, and a select few, know that he really WILL take that pity-money and march his scrawny legs directly to the nearest dealer. He is a living stereotype, and once upon a time he made the trip into my neighborhood twice a day – but no more. I sigh, and then I slap myself.
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