Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?

I took the bullet and spoke to another across the street neighbors couple last night. LMJ made the mistake of making eye contact so they crossed the street to see her. These are the last of the old school crazy neighbors, other than us. Everyone else is white bread Middle America nuclear family looking for a little something more cosmopolitan. The guy is redefining Irish literature, and the chick is just along for the ride. They’re very, very nice people, but they’re a little bit crazy. The chick is a waitress at one of my parents’ favorite restaurants, and adores my parents. They get V.I.P. treatment because of it and they let her bend their ears a little bit when they eat there. It was about seven o’clock, and MJ bailed upstairs with LMJ, with the legitimate excuse of it being LMJ’s bath time. Both of our nice neighbors were well on the way to not remembering the night, and it’s really hard to talk to drunken people when you’re sober. She spent most of the time gushing about how much she loves my parents and how she was going to help me get them relocated back to Jacksonville. Part of the problem for me is that I wished I had something to take the edge off, but we had big plans for the next day that started well before the sunrise. One plus was that I got some top notch gossip about the block; another was that it was good politics. As LMJ gets older, we can’t just continue to sit in our house like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Even though this couple doesn’t have kids, and aren’t going to, they’re still going to be around for a while – unless he actually does succeed in making Irish literature happy-go-lucky. At which point I’m sure he’ll pick up and move to a farm in Ireland. Although, I don’t think the Bud Light in a coozie will cut it with the Emerald Island locals no matter how up beat they become after reading his opus.