THE ONE BEST REASON TO TALK TO YOUR NEIGHBORS

 - LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR BACK   

Last Monday I woke up in the dead of night— totally alert. I glanced at the digital alarm clock; it was 3:15 a.m. I lay completely still, my ears, like a fine-tuned radar system, scanning for abnormal nocturnal sounds.   I heard a scuffling noise, I know I did. At first, I thought, that’s the dog, nudging his bowl around with his nose. He's probably hungry.

 Then I remembered: I don’t have a dog, haven’t had one since I was a kid.   Scuffling again, I now sat straight up and stared at my open bedroom door. Now there were heavy thuds. Those must be human feet, I thought. Ohmygodohmygod. A bright stabbing light slammed into my eyes. Oh, fckshitfckfshit!! Someone’s in my room!   Mesmerized by the bright light, I sat frozen in place. Someone was standing so close to my bed I could touch him. I just sat and stared at the light, a million thoughts of self-preservation flashed through my mind, every one, more ridiculous than the first. 

  “ALBERTON POLICE!!”   

The words reverberated through my skull. I still sat rigid. Then, without thinking my answer through, I croaked back: “Yeah?”   Total silence.  

 “ALBERTON POLICE!!”   

This time, I jumped out of bed and stood still, holding a pathetic defensive fist towards what now clearly seemed like a real uniformed, armed cop pointing his gun at my head. What if he really was a cop or maybe it was a dread villain preparing to shoot me to frking pieces. Time to find out!   

The police officer standing in my doorway to the kitchen, pointing his flashlight straight at me. I flinched. Behind him, a whole platoon of cops appeared to be backing him up.   “Is everything all right?” he asks.   All right? I guess things are all right. Everything’s great! Perfect night to exchange pleasantries.   “Your neighbor called us; your garage door was open. There’s been some criminal activity lately, so we have to search the place.” He paused and looked at me.  

 As it turns out, my garage door opener is hyper-sensitive, and sometimes just setting it down is enough to cause the door to start trundling open. At some point the night before, the button must have gotten nudged, and the door must have dutifully heaved itself to the sky.  That alone wouldn’t be so bad, except it’s the only line of defense — if the garage door is up, you literally can just waltz into my kitchen, cook yourself a meal, and make yourself at home.   “Is anything missing?” the police officer asked.   I glanced around and shrugged, too startled to think clearly. “Seems fine,” I said. 

The cops took down my info, and then they filed back out, down through the open garage, and out into the night. I hit the button and waited until the garage door clicked against the floor.   With the Alberton PD safely on its way, my jittery thoughts turned to my neighbor. She is a fiend for safety — and I’m grateful for that. We’ve promised to keep an eye out for one another on more than one occasion.  In fact, it’s pretty much the only way we interact. It would have been so much better if she’d called or texted before summoning armed men into my home — but of course, she doesn’t have my number. 

And that’s my fault, because it had never occurred to me that our relationship actually meant anything.   Unfortunately, I’m not the only one to forget to invest in my neighbors. It’s the whole thing behind next door neighbors, which sets out to connect people living in the same community. But as wood soon be discovered, suburbia had a different idea of how to employ their networking routes. They preferred it as a type of neighborhood watch, posting sightings of strangers around the block. The problem was that all too often, those strangers were only notable because of a darker skin color. 

Instead of encouraging community spirit, and multi-culturism, the platform was encouraging people to express their racism.  My brother in law Johan wove a great tale this week about how the world feverishly tries to tamp down racism, and how that turns out to be exceedingly hard to do. But that’s just one of the peculiar and unexpected ways communities behave in real life.