Sympathizing With The Enemy

I hate when the doorbell rings - positively loathe it in fact. That jarring surprise of fake bell tone echoing through my front room, making the dog bark like we are under a complete enemy siege, (whatever that looks like in dog terms - gang of cats in full Transformers gear perhaps?) just irritates the hell out of me.

So imagine how fab I was feeling yesterday afternoon when the tale my novel was weaving was abruptly cut off by two (two!) rings of my doorbell before I could even walk across my front room to answer it. Yeah, good times.

I opened the door on two little boys and a woman. The woman did the talking. She explained to me through intermittent bark-fire from lil Ruthy that she was a neighbor who lived behind me, her yard in fact being the one that borders my garage and the parking spot adjacent to it where my car can be found. I guess her boys just graduated from the Annie Oakley School and managed to miss their target on the fence and put a bb through the small space between two fence boards, and straight through the back window of my car. Yeah, good times.

One boy was slightly taller and chunkier than the other one. He was the first to pipe up, throwing his comrade under the bus by volunteering, "he was shy about coming over here" as he pointed to his right. I took my gaze to his brother and said, "I would be too" as I remembered the time my brother went to bed at 4:00 in the afternoon after we lobbed an asteroid sized dirt clod into the neighbor's pool while trying to hit rats in the Cypress trees on the shared fence line. Sal thought crime and punishment found no one in bed. Surely if he skipped dinner and hid under the sheets, no one would think of him when the mud sludge at the bottom of the pool was discovered. Yeah, good times.

And so my friends, this is where my grated nerve reaction to ringing doorbells, and icy reception to random neighbors breaking my stuff, started to melt away.

Of course he was feeling shy about coming over. I didn't mean to break anything! Who knows what scary adult lives in that house. Are they going to yell at me?!

No yelling. I found myself saying stupid forgiveness-esque shit like "accidents happen" and "thank you guys for being so honest about this".

Then my two new foes and I chatted it up a bit even laughing over the irony of how impossible their wipe-out my window shot would have been if they were actually trying to get that bb through the small space between those boards.

There was good news as well. Not only did mom leave her contact information and a promise to reimburse my repair costs, she informed me that I lived on a strawberry field - or rather the concrete slab hosting my abode was laid on land that used to be strawberry fields. A little history lesson she gleaned from another neighbor who was farming these rows of berries that went all the way to the sea apparently, back in 1948. Yeah, good times.

As they started to make their way back down the front walk, eventually everyone got around to petting lil Ruthy, and agreeing that she indeed looked like a Ruth.

The forgiveness-esque shit must have still been working it's good Juju on me, because I wasn't in the least irritated to sit down at the computer and start getting quotes on replacement windows. Let's hope that extends to today's project of cleaning up all the broken window glass and taping/plasticing the hole in my car. Yeah, good times.