The Street - A Composite Sketch (8)

Not a very long street, just off a major arterial, it is shaped like a question mark. At the conclusion of the bulge it meanders into another street. One half of the street backs onto a heavily wooded ravine, a neighbourhood treasure, though few of the street's residents quite recognize its value, nor make use of its propinquity. It cleanses the air everyone breathes, it hosts birds and wildlife and presents a treasury of wildflowers throughout the seasons. At one time the street, part of a larger suburban community, shared a small-town address. It has long since been subsumed into the greater national capital of the country, through a wide-ranging amalgamation of communities and even farms. The street and the houses on it were built two and a half decades ago. The domiciles are comprised mostly of single-family, detached dwellings, with a handful of semis verging on the main thoroughfare. Many of the residents are the original home purchasers. They would comprise roughly 50% of the residents of the street. The semis appear to have changed hands far more often than the detached homes. And those homes that have been re-sold have often enjoyed a succession of owners. The original home owners who moved into their houses when their children were small have mostly bid farewell to now-grown children. The street represents an amalgam of family types, and there is a significant percentage at this time, of retired people, singly and in couples who, though their houses are meant for family occupation, still opt to remain in their too-large, but comfortable and familiar and valued homes. It is a very quiet street, with little traffic other than those who live there. The house fronts are diverse, and attractive. Most residents take care of their homes, seeing them as their primary investments. Furnaces have been replaced, and air conditioners, and also windows. Kitchens and bathrooms have been remodelled, and people have added decks and occasionally airy 'summer houses' to the backs of their homes. One-third of the homes boast swimming pools, in-ground and above-ground. Most people take pride in their properties, and feel they must achieve lawns that are weedless and smoothly green. Some painstakingly remove weeds by hand in the spring, others hire lawn-care companies to spread chemicals on their lawns. Invariably, the people who look after their own gardens and lawns have superior gardens and lawns. Each house has a large tree planted in front; maples, ash,crabapples, spruce or pine, fully mature. This is a community that is truly mixed, representing people from around the world, come to Canada as immigrants, settled and making the most of opportunities open to all its citizens in a free and open society noted for its pluralism and dedication to fair representation. There are the extroverts and the introverts, those who prefer not to mingle, others who do. They are herewith loosely sketched:

This is the eighth part of the anatomy of The Street.

Back again to the odd-numbered side of the street, not a very long street, but with a fairly wide road, the lot sizes averaging 50' by 100'. But for those houses on the right curve whose lots are more pie-shaped and who have, as a result, extremely wide and sometimes long backyards. The property of this family was not one of these, but it did back on the ravine. And although they were not first-owners, memory is dim of the first family that purchased that house originally. They obviously did not make much of a social impact on their neighbours.

The subsequent owners have, at the very least, done that. And more. A fairly young couple. Both short of stature, he solidly built, and she with an exquisitely small frame, pretty and red-haired. He had the placid face of a Dutch burgher, and sure enough he was of Dutch extraction; his parents visited often. Oddly enough his parents were tall and angular; no familial resemblance, and no questions asked. Some eight years ago his mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and unfortunately, she died of the cancer within a year.

The young woman was originally from eastern Canada, and her mother, a tiny, pleasant-faced woman who was unpleasantly aloof and distant in manner, a widow. Notable because she occasionally came over from Prince Edward Island to spend the summer months in their first years in the house.To help the young couple raise their very young family, a small girl and her baby brother. They needed the help, because both parents worked. They were both lawyers, working for the Canadian military. During the rest of the year they employed a live-in nanny for the children.

They were, at first, exceedingly friendly, mostly to those people who lived in the larger houses, dismissive of those whom they appeared to deem below their notice. He was the friendlier of the two, and would talk expansively of inviting certain neighbours over for a 'drink' of an evening, although he never did. He often spoke disparagingly of their succession of nannies; none of them, he told those of his neighbours to whom he spoke, satisfied the rigorous standards of his wife, he would proudly say.

In their professional life they had reason to travel, he more than she. He might be gone for weeks at a time or more, to exotic locales. How exotic those locales might be would be a matter of opinion, but those places might range from Bosnia and Serbia, to Afghanistan to the High Arctic. She managed quite nicely in his absence, often inviting some of her co-workers to evening soirees. When he was at home they would often entertain, through dinner parties, and she felt in her social element.

They acquired a few cats, purebred, not permitted to exit the house. And soon enough, as the children grew older, they also took possession of two purebred dogs, Shelties. The dogs became the bane of their neighbours' existence. They were incredibly neurotic; if in the house they'd leap onto the sofa pushed against the front bow window and bark incessantly whenever cars or people passed on the road.

If outside on the backyard, they'd run insanely from one end of the backyard to the other, at the least bit of sound. They were known to snarl at people and to snap their displeasure. She took grave offence when another neighbour, walking her two quiet dogs, refused to allow those dogs to approach, reminding of their unfriendliness. That was sufficiently-caused umbrage never to speak to the neighbour again.

The children were growing older, but not physically maturing as the other neighbourhood children- with whom they had no social-play-relations whatever - were seen to be doing. The little boy was painfully scrawny, and wire his hair long and stringy. His mother would allow him to colour it odd colours at times as he moved into his teens. She thought that to be an expression of his individuality, his fearless rejection of what is seen to be socially acceptance; oddly at variance with her own values, it seemed, but no mind.

When the children were still both very young, their father would, every spring, haul their expensive-grandparent-given-gifts out to the driveway for an annual 'garage sale'. Which many of those living on the street quite appreciated, enabling them to procure excellent toys and bicycles, even beds and bureaus, for their children at prices they could afford. Often, when the mother returned home from work in her late-model car she would swoop her children up in her arms, calling them her 'darlings' and her 'beauties'.

As the girl grew into teenhood, she began to wear extremely tight jeans and tops to school. And high-heeled shoes, clattering on the street, to and from the bus stop. Her thin and pretty face was heavily made up and she made no stops to speak with any of the neighbours, much less their children also treading home from school. She did confide once to an enquiring neighbour that it was her intention to get a school-board variance to allow her to attend a high school dedicated to the arts. When the neighbour remarked that her own children had attended the same school, the girl seemed deflated and walked on.

The last several years neighbours were puzzled to notice an older man, not recognized as family, appeared to spend an awful lot of time at the house. Particularly in the absence of the husband. The husband would be gone somewhere for a few weeks, and along would come this man and he would obviously be staying for the duration. Moving out again on the husband's return. At first it was speculated that he was a hired handyman, before he took to staying over. Then he was taken to be a relative, helpful to the young woman in her husband's absence.

Their relationship, that of the older man with a fit and easy carriage, was none of those. And it wasn't exactly a menage a trois either, as it transpired. The older man was the young woman's now-retired former commander. On learning of the intricacies of the arrangement, neighbours hazarded the comment that the wife had finally met someone who met her iron personality with one of his own, and she enjoyed the novelty. Her husband, as the quaint saying went, did not wear the family trousers. Her will was imposed upon his.

And it was her will that she would no longer 'submit' to him. Their marriage had failed, though he had done his utmost to respond to her orders, and never, ever impose himself upon her. Her every wish was his command, and she commanded frequently and stringently. Not quite the uxorious husband, but a carefully diplomatic one, anxious to preserve the marriage, yet not, in his subservience, pleasing her one whit. What pleased her was her arrangement with her former superior.

There was, however, a certain awkwardness in the arrangements. Her lover, who had left his own family over their years-long affair, simply detested children and refused to have children live with him. So he hied himself off to his apartment, and would on occasion move in to the family house in the father's absence. The father, accepting of what he could not change, and unwilling to have the entire responsibility of supervising their children on his shoulders, agreed to their living together in this most unusual way.

The children, already sufficiently socially alienated, and demonstrating that in so many ways, from their unorthodox behaviour and dress code, to their shunning of the company of others, are unfortunate pawns in the arrangement. Hard to say when their psyches were so damaged; throughout the early years of witnessing and hearing parental discontent, or afterward in incipient adulthood, viewing the discord, unhappiness and eventual discarding of the marital contract.

But there they are, living in outward harmony for all to witness; those who care to note. An integral part of the street, in all the manifestations of the differences between human beings and the relations they cling to in a semblance of what might be construed as normalcy. Doing injury to themselves and to others, incapable of effecting a reasonable modicum of emotional discipline and harmony on themselves, let alone others.

They are of the street, but not quite participants on the street. The little old lady who normally canvasses for cancer once a year, avoids their house. She has too often been informed that oh dear, can't find the chequebook, and haven't a dime, come back another time, or better yet, I'll drop by your house with a donation. Doesn't happen. He is a severely conflicted human being. Outwardly, wanting to be accepted. Put to the test, he balks.

His behaviour elicits nothing but scorn from the men on the street. As for the women, not much sympathy. No plans afoot to move, just yet. Life is this awkward mechanism that keeps throwing sprockets in the free-wheeling turn of events, hobbling peoples' intentions. And the two children go about their glum and taciturn existence.