Eyes On The Neighbourhood

In the several decades we have lived in this house, on this street, there have been many occasions when we’ve had to regretfully wave good-bye to neighbours with whom we had warm relations.

Oh, you say you’ll keep in touch, and you mean it. You do, in fact, soon after the fact, keep in touch, usually through emailing one another, satisfying the nostalgic moments of reminiscing and up-to-dating, but somehow, those messages get fewer and further between, until you’re just left with the occasional twinge of remembrance and wonder…

We wondered, for example, why the black family that lived directly across the street with their two young boys, decided to move to the United States where he was given a job offer he felt he just couldn’t overlook. He had been the first person to knock on our door, to welcome us to the neighbourhood when we first moved in, and we really thought highly of those two, husband and wife.

Wondered too, why another family decided to sell their lovely home and move to a rural property for their retirement. Surely the conveniences at their age of libraries, hospitals, doctors, shopping at close range would have been more valuable as they aged? Then of course, a number of military families with adolescent children, moving on, moving on…

We stayed. Well, we’ve other good neighbours we have known since we moved into our house, and they too stayed. Their children grew from infancy to adulthood while we as their neighbours on the street, watched incredulously.

And then, of course, as old neighbours moved on, new neighbours came in. Sometimes older people, and just as often young families. It was interesting to see a house with three or four bedrooms previously lived in by just one couple growing older together, was vacated, to be possessed by a growing family of young kids, filling up the rooms of the house as they were meant to be.

Odd thing that, too. There resulted a balance between white-haired residents, sitting out in the summer on lawn chairs, and children running about the street, playing children’s games. In the winter, hockey nets would come out and the boys would play street hockey. In the spring, basketball nets were raised, and boys and girls used those, but more often the girls would huddle together and play different kinds of games. A lot of the families living in those houses had the added convenience with which to entertain their brood, of backyard swimming pools.

When, once, an older couple who owned a business nearby sold their house because his rheumatoid arthritis made the stairs in the house an agony, in moved a younger couple with a mixed brood. Mixed, because he’d been married before and so had she. His were older, between high school and university, while hers were young, all five of them. The children had had a Guatemalan father, and they were dark skinned, with glossy black hair. And beautifully mannered, just the loveliest kids, thanks to their mother’s careful tutelage.

A few years after that family moved in, a couple we’d known well who lived down the street, sold their house and in moved another family. An elderly man as it happened, with a young, vivacious wife, and their two very young children. The little girl a veritable princess and her younger brother a tiny prince.

They too had coloured skin, for their mother was Cuban. A dancer, she said proudly to me. Their father? An older man, a dour Scotsman, whom she had met at a diplomatic affair in Cuba, for he was a Canadian ‘diplomat’. Which, my husband later said, quite adequately explains their strange union.

He must have seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, my husband said, a bachelor with a diplomat’s position and salary to match, to an impoverished, artistically-inclined social climber looking to advantage herself and her extended family. For as it transpired, her parents came to visit from Cuba on his dime, and while they were there, temporarily living with their daughter, their grandchildren - and son-in-law matching them in age but not opportunities - they did work around the house - gardening, cleaning, that kind of thing.

Fact was, this was a man who was careful with his money, true to his heritage. I discovered that myself when I went out on the neighbourhood, doing the many door-to-door charitable canvasses I can never bring myself to refuse. The man would never part with a dime in exchange for a charitable receipt.

In fact, that’s the way I first met them. He responded to the door bell, regarding me distantly, disinterestedly, as I began my spiel. Which I interrupted to welcome him to the neighbourhood. At which he evinced some interest, as I explained that I lived up the street, myself. His wife joined him on the porch, just as I was explaining precisely which of the houses was the one I lived in.

She fairly scintillated, she was so lively and bubbly. Out came her life story - or just about. And out came the children, one by one. The four-year-old little girl, a tiny replica of her beautiful, sensuous-looking mother, followed by her toddler of a brother. Who did not one iota resemble the elderly man who beamed at both children.

He had already abruptly refused to part with any of his hard-earned cash, to my invitation to donate to the Cancer Society. But we stood there, neighbours, me waxing eloquent about the wonderful neighbourhood, its amenities and its great residents.

The children dashed about, up and down the driveway, one chasing the other, then doing a turn-about. They were clearly the apples of their parents’ gleaming eyes. And I marvelled, regarding the young mother standing beside the grim-faced elderly man, what life might be like for her, living with such a one as he appeared to be from outward appearances.

It took some time before it was fully revealed just what life might have been like for her. I knew she was busy, ferrying the children about, driving them to a private school some distance from where we lived. I knew she was involved with some of her countrymen, artists of one dimension or another, who often were to be seen at the Cuban embassy, where she too would be invited. When she was absent, her mother would be there to tend to the children’s needs.

Another of our neighbours, who lived directly across from us, where the black family had used to live, had a marked interest in the neighbourhood. From her vantage point at the curve of the street, she could see, from her upper bedroom windows, up the street in one direction, down the street, in the other direction. And she could see directly into peoples’ garages, sometimes into their backyards, and perhaps not so oddly, she acquired information about those neighbours that others were not privy to.

This information she was obligingly happy to share with anyone else who might be interested. Actually, not quite true; she was not all that friendly with most of the people on the street, but she was with us, for some reason.

It was she, in fact, who had alerted us to the fact we needn’t really have needed to know, that another of our neighbours was cheating, in the most spectacular way, on his wife. And here’s the strange thing about that: this neighbour, whom I’d known for decades and really liked an awful lot, was also considerably older than his wife. He had never been previously married, his wife had, and she had two young boys, whom he adopted as his own when they married.

And now that they were in high school, this very sociable man was making very bold moves with a friend of his wife, another young blonde and attractive woman. Making out with her, according to this neighbour, right in the garage, while his wife were busy hostessing at one of their many pool parties. I wasn’t surprised, knowing how much he liked women, but I was disappointed.

Years later he too feels the same way, because he’s alone, the boys gone off on their own lives, now young adults, and his wife long separated from him, and adamantly refusing to listen to his pleas to please return, he misses her, loves her, regrets his behaviour, and he now has problems with MS.

He is a dear man, and I do appreciate him, and I commiserate with him, rattling around that big house all alone. He’s tried out a few girlfriends, a few even moved in, but it just didn’t work out. It’s hard, he tells me, to find women, at his age. Although he’s a gallant, a teaser, a good-looking man still, who looks after himself. Finally, he’s got a little cat, and that helps. From the animal shelter. He loves that little cat.

More latterly, our neighbour across the street who was able to look into that poor man’s garage, was also able to view at leisure everything that happened in and around the house with the morose old man and the sparkling young Cuban woman. Lots of shouting, she said, plenty of crockery being tossed around. Ever notice a red car with diplomatic plates parked alongside the driveway? Nope. Well, it’s a Cuban man who works at the embassy. And he’s been hanging around plenty. Especially when the husband is out of town. Oh dear.

Oh well, that was years ago, as it happens. And now, when I knock on that door to say I’m collecting, variously, for Heart & Stroke, Kidney, MS, Cancer, CNIB, for example, I’m greeted by that rictus-grim smile, a shrug and the little line that “times are tight”.

He does not pay child support. His lovely wife is nowhere to be seen. He does, this crotchety old geezer, have his children with him. He is now retired, living well on a gold-plated pension, and he takes tender, loving care of his children. They are all he has, and that is quite a lot, come to think of it. When speaking of the children, his smile becomes genuine, and his face softens and he has the look of a father.

One of the younger bi-racial Guatemalan girls confided in me not all that long ago that she had been awfully upset when another of the girls on the street informed her that she might not play with her any longer. The reason being, the tiny princess, now somewhat grown into a pretty girl, informed her that one shouldn’t play with “blacks”. I advised her to take no notice, since her detractor’s skin colour is very like her own beautifully burnished colour, and she smiled beatifically. Her mother, I’m certain, would take good care of her children’s robust self-esteem.

It’s spring again, and good weather brings the children out to display their growing limbs, to permit the warming sun to kiss their faces, and to enable them to play all the games that children clamour and long for during inclement, dark winter days when the cold keeps them indoors far too often. All the little girls appear to have been reconciled with one another.

However, our neighbour, mother of the Guatemalan children, advised me they were preparing to sell their house and return to whence they had come, the east coast of Canada. There to settle once again, among their extended family to share in their warmth and loving embrace. It would be good for the children, she said, with a deep longing in her voice and her eyes, to be re-united herself, with her mother, her sisters, her cousins.

Yes, it would be good for those children whose father had long ago abandoned them. But whose new step-father had taken them deep into his heart. They will all be missed.

Not, though, by our neighbour who lives directly across the street. The one who fills us in on all the street gossip we would never be aware of, otherwise. She will be glad to see them go. The parents have a habit of installing those big clumsy stands at the top of which hangs a basketball net, across from their own house, at the curve of the street, beside our angry neighbour’s house, and it’s a nuisance.

And, besides that, the boy, the oldest of the bi-racial children, once backed his mother’s car out of their garage, and the car just kept going, until it ramped over their lawn, and hit their back fence, destroying a good portion of it. The boy‘s parents, of course, replaced the fence with many apologies. But of such incidents are relationships built - or not.

The latest information we received from our loquacious and curious friend is that, though a young and vigorous woman, she suffers from a genetic default that brings early vision problems to members of her family. She may be unable to view from the top floor of her home on its essential neighbourhood-viewing site all that occurs in the area, for a while.

An operation for glaucoma has more or less put her out of commission. Post-surgery it has been impressed upon her the dire necessity to rest on her stomach for many hours at a stretch, facing downward, to aid in the full restoration of her eyesight.