A nice thing happened to me the other day. A neighbor whom I've always disliked intensely has suddenly decided to move away. I had thought I was always going to be stuck with this guy till I died, for he had settled in and set up his business. I was so thrilled that I told every neighbor in sight. Not everyone is so annoyed by this guy, so my jumping around and whooping got some strange looks.
He lives down the hill and he styles himself a “woodsmith” and he makes noise all the time especially on the weekends. He's one of these Americans who loves loud machines. His sneeze reverberates over the entire neighborhood, and his sharp tenor voice is frankly pleasing but it resonates up the hill, and his conversation is focused on making more noise. He has thinning dark hair and a long black beard. When he walks, he rolls from side to side like a sailor and holds his arms out away from his sides, one of those rugged fellows whose arms are too strong to be controlled. Yet he has Trump-like, tiny hands, just like me.
He’s maybe in his late 40’s, but he talks like he’s out of the 1950’s. When introducing his father to another neighbor, he said, “Tom, Gary. Gary, Tom,” sniggering like it was a grand joke. This is clearly someone with whom I cannot have any sort of conversation.
He and his wife, a nasty-minded woman who has never smiled, have one mode of process: if it’s a thumbtack, they’ll take a sledgehammer to it. In a neighborhood where no one cares much about property lines, they had at least two surveys done early in their ownership.
Due to brilliant work done by someone during the inception of our neighborhood 30 years ago, his property includes the road and my side yard. He pointed this out by having huge stones settled in on the property line. A landscape architect we hired to try to mitigate the damage laughed and said, “I wonder why someone would spend so much money to do something so ugly.”
Anyway, apparently he decided to move out beyond Hood Canal (40 minutes to the north and west of us) to destroy a bunch of acres where he can have a workshop and make all the noise he wants without nagging old men like me to contend with.
This is really a significant moment in my life. Not only is the guy noisy but he's a terrible neighbor. He and his wife have lied to us on numerous occasions—about landscaping, the number of trees they’ve cut down, the importance of those trees, the size of their lot (not five acres that the wife boasted but just one), etc. The wife has at least one thing in common with Trump: she’s never told me the truth.
Unfortunately, they, us, and six other families share a common well, which we all own together. The well is on his property, and he has been quite clear about how he would manage it—till now when he’s moving and it’s sprung a leak and is filled with mildew.
Living with a bad neighbor is like living in prison. On a lovely summer’s day, I can sit out in our front yard reading with the dogs sleeping nearby, but I have to listen to his saws whining, his backhoes churning, the whir and rasp of his lawnmower and weedwhacker.
There's never anything anyone can do about stuff like this. I called the police once when he was making an extraordinary amount of noise one day. The officer said there was really nothing they could do unless it was on a Sunday or a holiday. Of course, living in Mayberry as we do, our police don’t answer the phone on Sundays, and even I am not going to call 911 over something like this.
(As a practitioner of the narrative arts, I, like you, am wondering if I’m getting too far and have taken too much time away from the subject implied by the title. Not much longer, I promise.)
Once the reality that they were moving sunk in, it occurred to me that this was the nicest thing that had happened to me in a long time. I thought back and realized that the last really nice thing that had happened was Kate being admitted to Smith College.
I realized then (here we go, finally,) that nice things don't really happen to you once you retire. Bad things don't happen to you either, until your friends begin to die. I have weaseled around that one by having only very few friends. And they are in better health than I am or are younger and will probably outlive me.
I hadn't realized that this would be the nature of retiring. You don't have a job, so you don't get promoted, you don't get raises, but you also don't get fired. You don't have wins and losses. Only small incidents like standoffs occur, like asking this guy to turn off his machinery and him saying yeah maybe later. I used to ask people who were idling their cars needlessly to heed the dangers of global warming and shut it down, but you can imagine how that went. (See post of February 15, 2020, “A Contemporary Dilemma: Idling Cars”.)
This feeling of just floating through my retired life may be a result of my being somewhat inactive. I saw myself hacking around with lots of golf and tennis. Maybe I could even have played old man’s softball. And I thought I would have plenty of time to do some really serious writing. I'm not saying I was going to be spry. My mother did spry but it always felt unintentionally ironic. But I was going to have a reasonably active sporting and writing life. Living that kind of life affords you all kinds of minor ups and downs—OK, in writing, mainly downs. (See post titled “J” dated June 27, 2019).
Due to my arthritis, I'm not playing any tennis or golf. My writing career ground to a halt after the two books so I'm not having any of the joys of publishing a book and having nobody buy it. I'm not enough of a sports fan to give a crap whether the Mets win their division, and I really don't care what happens to the Mariners, residing, mortifyingly, in the American League. I wish some redneck oil magnate would move the Seahawks to Tulsa. I actually root against my alma mater (don’t make me say the name.) So sports fanaticism isn’t really an option. Maybe this is simply the trade-off of contentment. Nothing good, nothing bad, just everything working out.
When you look at the two happy incidents, in fact, neither had much to do with me. Kate got into Smith entirely on her own, and only by wildly exaggerating how obnoxious I was to the neighbors could I consider myself even a remote cause of their moving.
Yet I’ve always been competitive! I revel disgustingly in the wins! I plunge into suicidal despair at the losses!
But it’s also true that I like not to have to go into an office anymore. I like to please people, but not unreasonably demanding old white men who boast about inventing the rules of evidence, or, when I was in-house, the illiterate business department heads who asked to read the regulations themselves to prove me wrong. I think I had maybe one good client in my life. The rest had fake deadlines, wouldn’t respond to questions, and, sometimes, didn’t pay.
OK, actually I’m really happy not to have big wins and losses anymore. The losses can be frustrating, unfair, and humiliating, and even the wins are illusory. I’ve grown perfectly happy having my mornings with my cup of strong coffee, my eight news sources, and my books. And now I won’t have the sound of heavy construction floating up from down the hill. There’s a lesson for all of us: in retirement, you can find a little peace, if you let yourself.
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