The Daily Brief

For many years, I’ve kept in touch with some friends – a retired couple who live in … well, let’s just say it’s a semi-rural, and congenial neighborhood in a western state blessed with rather nice hills and mildish winters. They have a near neighbor whose antics over the last twenty years have enlivened the occasional communications that I have with these friends … because this individual has the opposite of the golden touch. Everything he touches invariably turns to the stuff that is swept up from the street after the horses have gone by. It’s been an unfailing gift; in the words of the demotivational poster, his purpose in life is to serve as a bad example.

If he were just feckless and congenial, that would be one thing: My friends say their other neighbors all are nice people; they would work hard to rescue such a person from various disastrous consequences. Alas, he is not. Besides the leaden touch, he is also self-regarding, confrontational and a bully. My friends and their neighbors have all learned cynicism, and to sit back and await the inevitable spectacular pratfall. Every neighborhood has one of these people; there was a resident of my parent’s old neighborhood in Sunland-Tujunga who earned an official injunction against ever dialing 9-1-1.

My friends bad-example neighbor got off on the wrong foot, yea these many years ago in buying at the peak of the local real estate bubble. The property was a goodish size, planted with a thriving fruit orchard, mature trees, a lath-house and a beautiful garden planted with many exotic specimens. There was a well-kept double-wide trailer -many residents in this neighborhood lived in trailers or RVs while building a permanent house. The bad-example neighbor moved in with his spouse and children, telling everyone that he had bought this hilltop property as an investment. The bursting of the real estate bubble and a subsequent drought put an end to that plan; the bad-example neighbor pinched pennies by not watering the orchard – the fruit-trees all died. The garden also died, although the specimen plants could have been sold to local plantsmen and nurseries for a tidy sum … if the bad-example neighbor had only known. Bad-example neighbor turned out to be slightly delusional about where his property-lines ran, and engaged in a bitter conflict with the owners of two adjacent properties when they put up fence-lines.

Maintenance on the double-wide was deferred, and deferred again: The electrical system was outright dangerous and the roof leaked. Bad-example neighbor did not really have any construction or technical skills, as many of the other neighbors did, and his spouse was, charitably, not the best housekeeper in the world. To save money on getting the septic tank pumped, bad-example neighbor insisted that his family not flush the toilet until they had been used three times. At that point, my friends and the other neighbors agreed that the place had become unspeakably squalid. Bad example-neighbor and his spouse divorced; most everyone agreed his spouse was struck with a moment of clarity. He kept custody of their children; she engaged in professional training and eventually got a good job.

Around that point, a wild-fire swept through the area, and bad-example neighbor’s double-wide and the remaining outbuildings were casualties … which did solve the problem of deferred maintenance, although several neighbors were appalled to discover that when bad-example neighbor evacuated ahead of the fire, he left two dogs behind. The neighbors fed and tended the dogs, one of which was slightly burned.

Bad-example neighbor lives in town, now – usually coming out to the property on weekends. He keeps a small tractor, in a storage shed. He has delusions about sub-dividing the land, and to that end has constructed a dirt road along the property-line, which has had the effect of shifting a seasonal watercourse to now drain directly into one neighbor’s driveway and another’s horse corral. There will be the inevitable repercussions from those neighbors about this. My friends sigh, with exasperation, now and again, wondering just how it could be worse. That it could be worse is not much comfort.

Yeah, I know – embarrassing to admit: we’re scroungers and scavengers. We’re not quite up there with the junkers in pick-up trucks who circulate in ours and other neighborhoods during that week when householders are putting out items for bulk trash pickup, but heaven knows, my daughter and I have staggered home of a morning, burdened with discarded but perfectly good pottery pots, with revivable plants, garden knick-knacks, a twelve pack of brand-new canning jars (as if someone got the urge to make jam or something, and thought better of it), and a chaise-lounge made of two-by-fours which may have had a leeetle bit of wood-rot on one leg . . . oh, the list is endless.

I suppose I hit some kind height – or nadir – when I was surveying one large curbside mound outside a home from which someone had evidently just moved and had hit that ‘oh, s**w it, I’m gonna throw it away rather than pack another thing!’ wall. There actually was one of the professional scroungers with his junk-laden van parked by the curb, industriously rummaging through the pile – a lot of cheap knock-down furniture and faintly dingy electronics, IIRC – and I very politely asked him to hold the dog’s leashes, so that I could retrieve a large and slightly wilted Brugmansia (Angel Trumpet) from a position on the very top of the pile. He did – apparently having no interest in slightly past their-best-if-used-by-this-date garden plants. (The Brugmansia has done pretty well, by the way – a little nipped by frost now and again, but it always comes back. The trick to making them thrive, by the way, is using plenty of the fertilizer designed for hibiscus.) And then there was a pile of discards by a house undergoing renovation . . . we scored a replacement sliding screen door out of that. A pair of dogs that my daughter had decided to shelter in a fit of noble high-mindedness had thoroughly shredded the previously existing screen and bent the heck out of the metal frame. What does it say that a construction discard was a step up, quality-wise? At least, the price was right.

Plants and pots – especially pots: those are the most excellent finds in my neighborhood. Not quite sure about why that should be so, except that the turnover during the PCS season in our neighborhood is pretty brisk. Heavy pottery pots just don’t transport well . . . not to mention the plants in them. In a military move, that tends to be the kind of thing given away or discarded, right off the bat . . . so they wind up on the curb, in spite of being in perfectly good shape and even rather expensive to start with. So – when they finish up in my garden, it’s just karmic payback for all the plants and their pots that I gave away, upon departing assignments in Greece, Spain and Utah.

I do wonder now and again, what the pickings would be like in other neighborhoods – those which reflect a higher socio-economic level than mine. That is to say, the rich ones. Probably some very nice things, if the experience of one of my mothers’ neighbors in California is anything to go by. He’s a building contractor, who does very high-end renovations, and his own house and garden is almost entirely fitted out with materials that were excess to the needs of various projects, or perfectly good and salvaged from them – even the tiles on his roof were from a job.

On the day when someone in my neighborhood replaces a granite counter-top with whatever the new trend in counter-tops will be – I will be so there.