“…Nothing’s standing in my way…
Well – today wasn’t a PERFECT day – but I can’t seem to get the above song from the end of “Legally Blonde” out of my head…
“…Nothing can go wrong…”
Nothing really went WRONG. There were just a couple of bumps in the road…
“Wake up! Don’t tell me it’s just a dream…”
…that the bad and wrong and incorrect can exist right alongside the good and right and oh, so special…
My day today started out with me stepping outside my front door to refill the cats’ water bowl on my front porch. Suddenly, I see a woman in a minivan that I somewhat recognize, looking like she’s going to try and park right in my driveway – even though there are pretty obvious impediments to her doing so. Her driver’s side window is down, so I step off my porch and walk over to her car. I politely say, “Excuse me – you can’t park there – that’s my driveway.” She stares at me and says, “That ain’t your driveway…” I reply, “Oh, but yes it is.” She then says, “I don’t wanna argue with you, but that ain’t your driveway…” I’m thinking, honey, if you don’t wanna argue with me, you’re certainly not doing a very good job of it. Instead I say to her, “That IS my driveway. This is my house, and that’s where I park my car.” She then motions towards my house saying, “You own that?” Now I’m losing my patience. I say, “Yep – that’s my house, and I own this property too. That’s my driveway, and that’s where I park my car.” She now looks around kind of absentmindedly and says, “Oh yeah, I think I’ve seen your car parked there sometimes…” Well, no – not SOMETIMES – that’s where I park my car ALL THE TIME. And when it’s NOT there, it’s being used by my husband for work. And when he comes back, that’s where he parks. So…if you’re blocking it…
As it turns out, I remember who she is when she abruptly ends the pointless conversation she started and pulls across the street to AN EMPTY SPOT in front of the house THAT SHE IS GOING TO. Later that day, I received a text from my neighbor across the street saying, “I apologize about my aunt, Ms. Carol. I told her don’t come starting confusion with my neighbors.” Neighbor runs a daycare and was having a little Halloween party for the kids, and aunt apparently came to help out.
Bless her heart…
Halloween party ends after a few hours of watching the kids run around and play in their costumes, eat snacks, play games, and have fun in a bounce house. A couple of other adults had also come to help out my neighbor. Time for the kids to go inside and nap, so things begin to get picked up. The bounce house is deflated, and the folding table with the kids’ Halloween party treats is brought up to the porch behind the railing in front of my neighbor’s door. She didn’t want to make noise bringing the table in while the kids were napping, and getting them all inside for their nap was the priority.
There was an orange, black and white balloon arch that was part of the decorations outside. My neighbor temporarily attached it to her garbage can which was on the curb in front of her house. One minute the balloons were there, and the next minute they weren’t. I decided to step outside to see if they had been blown down the street. Suddenly I see a strange man pick up one of the empty cardboard boxes from the ground next to my neighbor’s trash can, walk up the steps to her porch – and proceed to start removing items from the table and putting them in the box!!
I stepped out my front door onto my porch and yelled at him, “Hey! That’s not yours! Get off her porch!” He looked over at me and mumbled something like, “Oh, I thought it was free, because you know, it’s Halloween.” Again I yelled at him, “It’s not yours, get off her porch!” At the same time I was calling out to my neighbor, because she sometimes sits on her side steps while the kids are napping. The man put what he took back on the table and left, walking around the corner, still carrying the box.
I finally texted my neighbor, telling her that this guy was on her porch trying to steal stuff and that I ran him off. She thanked me, and I stepped down off my porch and was standing by my front steps. Suddenly, I see the guy come back from around the corner – STILL holding the box – and he stops on the corner on the other side of the street and sees me looking in his direction.
He suddenly yells over at me from there – “So, what – you’re gonna WATCH me now? You trying to cause trouble?” I yelled back, “No – are you?” He tried to say something else, but I didn’t give him a chance. At the top of my lungs I yelled, “You don’t live around here – GET LOST!”
As it turns out, he eventually left – after walking out of sight and coming back again a couple of times to glare from the corner – and finally being confronted by my neighbors (one of which is my very tall immediate next-door neighbor who has four young sons). More serious conflict avoided, his wife and kids were now sitting outside, our other neighbor from across the street was coming home from work, and we all wound up standing outside chatting. Suddenly a car slowly comes down the street, and the driver is waving to all of us from his open window. Only one of us knew that this was our newest neighbor who had just moved into the empty apartment in the house on the corner.
So our newest neighbor, a 30-something guy named Chad, climbs out of his car, along with his parents who are helping him move in, and we all converge to introduce ourselves. “We’re the neighborhood welcoming committee” I quip…
Our cohesive, diverse, we-all-look-out-for-each-other little block chatted some more and found out about our newest addition – and hopefully made Chad (and his parents) feel even better about the choice he made for his own little piece of New Orleans.
And then, my day ended in a totally opposite way than it had begun, when my husband came home from work and handed me a small box. “You were telling me about something last weekend while we were at Oktoberfest,” he said. “Something that you had once, and you were describing it to me.” I couldn’t remember what we had been talking about or what the conversation was. He held the box out to me in his hand and said, “I hope I got it right.” As I lifted the top of the box and looked inside, there lay an Avon necklace that my godmother had given to me for my sixteenth birthday in 1977. It was the last gift I had ever received from her before her death the following year. And I lost it when our apartment in New York City was broken into three years after I had received it and all my jewelry was stolen. It’s a goldtone chain holding a pale pink heart with a keyhole in it, and hanging next to the heart on the chain is a tiny key. I loved that necklace so much simply for the fact that it came from my godmother who I also loved so much. And my husband found it online and gave it back to me. When he asked me if it was the right necklace, I nodded and burst into tears.
The peculiarity and uncertainty of this day, right alongside the warmth, love and emotion simply reveals the contrasts of life – and what we consciously choose to focus on. And if we can acknowledge the existence of the negative, all while embracing the positive, every day can ultimately be the “perfect day”.
Oddly Enough 