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Monday, 06 February 2012

Nameless Neighbors

By Andrea Kline

My father, a WWII veteran and New York City firefighter, lived for 48 years in the same garden apartment with my mother.

Most of the neighbors were his peers who had all moved into the cooperative apartment complex built for WWII veterans at the same time and never moved out. Yet despite living with these neighbors for most of his adult life my father never called them by their given name when speaking about them.

Each neighbor had a special name based on his or her attributes, most decidedly unflattering. There was the portly gentleman, “little Mr. Five by Five.” The anxiety-ridden gentleman who circled his car several times to make sure it was locked was “Crazy around the car.” And his neighborhood enemy was “FU Johnson.”

“Waterbags” was the overweight lady who insisted she held a lot of fluid and the hearing challenged woman was “Little Deafy.”

It drove my mother crazy but drove my brother and me into gales of laughter. After my mother’s death, my father spent some years in an assisted living facility where no one had names either.

Now I’m in my sixties and my father is only a memory I carry in my heart. But now my husband carries on the proud tradition started by his father-in-law. The other day I was in the kitchen and my husband, glancing out the window said, “Look, it’s the crazy dog lady.”

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Posted by Ronni Bennett at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

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