Neighbors I Never Really Knew:
1. In the fall of 1987, I did a semester in Dublin with my two best friends from college, Colleen and Guppie; we rented a flat together in the Sandymount suburb of the city. We had the downstairs, and above us lived two Asian tenants, a male and a female, whom we called The Chinese Acrobats due to their penchant for continuous thumping, clomping, and whamming. We never spoke to these housemates — their flat being up a staircase, beyond a closed door — unless they opened the door to call down “Telephone!” Thus, even though their faces are smudges in my memory, they will always remind me of an era when a ringing phone was was actually answered
2. The year after we graduated from college, Colleen, a friend named Dan, and I rented half of a duplex on Harriet Avenue in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood. On the main floor of the house lived a few “older” guys (maybe, like, 28?) whom we never got to know past quick hellos as we passed each other. Colleen remembers these housemates as “beer-soaked” before noting, “…then again we were pretty beer-soaked, too.” I remember one of them, slight of build, a thin blonde mullet topping his ubiquitous denim jacket, because he was kind enough to respond to my frantic knocking the time I saw a mouse in our apartment. Sloshing a little as he walked, he climbed the stairs to our place and did a requisite look through all the closets, scanning the counters and baseboards. We found neither mouse nor lasting friendship
3. My first year of graduate school at the University of Idaho, I lived in the Alumni Residence Center, a concrete leviathan that housed males on one floor, females on another. While I became good friends with several of the women at my end of the hall, I never connected much with the other, hmmm, 40 females on that floor, not even during hundreds of trips to the shared bathroom. Over winter break, everyone cleared out except for one young woman, a meaty menace if ever I’d seen one, a flat-faced snarker named Cheyenne. When I returned to my room after break, my television was gone. Stolen. The theft was never solved EVEN THOUGH IT CLEARLY WAS CHEYENNE WHO TOOK IT. Not one to be daunted by loss of a small television set, I drove directly to the store and used money I didn’t have to buy a bigger, newer set that weighed 274 pounds. Getting it up the stairs to my room had me dripping with sweat, one lung partially collapsed, but victory was mine: there was no way the concrete leviathan that was Cheyenne could pick up that brute and make off with it when I went to Colorado for Spring Break. She might try, but the effort would bust her ribcage
4. After finishing graduate school, I landed a job teaching composition at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Since a full-time job teaching comp in 1993 paid $17,000/year, with no benefits, I would need to live on a tight budget, which is not easily achieved in most parts of Colorado. Fortunately, there was a cottage for rent behind a bigger house on Tejon Street, and it was going for $300/month. I snapped up that cottage and, despite living there for more than a year, never did speak to the scary looking guys — both of them with complicated facial hair, sleeves of tattoos, and massive belt buckles — who lived in the Big House up front. With some justification, I called them The Drug Dealers, but our interactions were non-existent outside of my saying “Hi” or asking them about the going rate for a kilo of coke
5. When we moved to the village of Ortahisar in the Cappadocia region of Turkey in 2010, we rented a 400-year-old Greek house not far from the center of town. Just across the narrow, dusty street lived an older couple who insisted we call them “komsu,” the Turkish word for “neighbor.” The fact that we never really got to know them had nothing to do with lack of effort, as they asked us in for tea many times, tried to plop the kids onto their donkey, and helped us set up our coal-burning soba stoves in the winter. Rather, it was the lack of common language that thwarted a friendship — that, and the fact that they were grasping, almost mercenary, in their desire to see the insides of our wallets. On the first day we met them, the wife went into her bedroom, took a headscarf out of a drawer, wrapped it around my head, and said, “Bes lira” (five lira). Then she started feeding us, pricing each item as we chewed. Turns out a jar of pekmez would also be “Bes lira!” The language barrier proved helpful, for we couldn’t afford the cost of their friendship**
(**with the Turkish words used here, the “s” should have a little tail hanging from it, but this blog won’t support such characters)
Typing: 20:46
Editing: 8:03