This Has Been Fun - Now Can We Never Do It Again?

*After a couple of heavy entries, here's one on the lighter side*

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a big Duran Duran fan. If you don't know, now's as good a time as any to learn.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby...

It was December 2005. The band were going to perform in their hometown of Birmingham, England, and much to my surprise, many of my new-found DC friends were planning to go. In a fit of excitement I checked my frequent flier miles, knowing that a free (or almost free) ticket was the only way I could talk myself into such a crazy idea. Discovering that I had enough miles for a ticket on Virgin Atlantic, I booked a ticket to London's Heathrow Airport and was scheduled to arrive a few hours before a good friend and another woman who would soon become a good friend. I flew up to Boston on Thursday, December 15, and caught the short five-and-a-half hour flight to London.

(As a quick, unpaid aside, if you've never flown Virgin Atlantic, I urge you to do so. I don't care if you get off the plane in London and immediately board your return flight. It is what air travel should be. The same goes for Virgin America.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. I have a difficult time sleeping on planes. I have to be dead tired to fall asleep in an upright position, and this flight was no exception. I slept maybe one or two hours on the overnight trip to London. When we landed it was around seven in the morning. The other two women weren't going to arrive for at least an hour, so I walked until I found an area with some chairs and sat and waited.

I eventually found both women at the baggage claim area. We then took a bus to the nearest train station, where we got a train up to Birmingham. Once there, we got a cab to our hotel and I tried in vain to take a nap while my two companions explored the hotel. That night we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant with some other Americans and Brits who were also planning to attend the concert the next night. After dinner we went to a dance club that was right across the street from the place where the band got their start - a place that is now an Australian restaurant.

From New Wave night spot to mediocre Aussie dining establishment. Well, nothing stays the same, does it?

Anyway, we entered the club, claimed one spot in the corner, threw all our coats and purses in a pile, and proceeded to cut loose. I've never been in such a crowded room in my life. A simple trip to the restroom necessitated a familiarity with strangers that in some Third World countries would require marriage. Good times. No, really.

After my group left the club we returned to our hotel with a few of the local Brits (friends, not pick-ups) and had another drink or two at the bar, then retired at the late hour of five in the morning. My friends and I awoke around ten and if you're keeping track, which I was, you'll notice that I had by this point had maybe six hours of sleep total in the past two nights.

We got ready, meandered through the center of town, and had lunch. By the time we returned it was time to start getting ready for the concert that night, as the three of us had special tickets that got us into a reception that started around five. My friends and I waited until the last minute to take our seats in the arena, and by the end of the reception we were buying champagne for the few people left in the room.

After the show we hung out at the bar of the hotel where most of the other Americans were staying. Now, there's a law in Britain that requires you to have booked a room at a hotel in order to buy drinks in the bar after 10:30 at night. This was a slight inconvenience, but we got around it by asking the others to order drinks for us, giving them money, of course. After much carousing, my friends and I returned to our hotel around five and had to get up at eight the next morning. As we're counting, that amounts to about nine hours of sleep in three nights.

The reason we had to drag ourselves out of bed after so little sleep was to catch a charter bus that took a bunch of us Yanks up to Manchester for the next concert later that evening. When I awoke, I had an ache in my stomach that both urged and dared me to eat some real food, as I had eaten nothing since lunch the previous day. The only thing I could find at the hotel was a shop selling some shortbread cookies, so that was breakfast.

I slept part of the way to Manchester. Or did I pass out from exhaustion? It's a fine line. When we arrived at our hotel my friends and I had a late lunch at the restaurant and then had to start getting ready for that night's show. I remember that when we got up to the room, I lay down on the bed murmuring, "Oh my God, oh my God" while my friends exhorted me to get up, lest I reach the point of no return.

We got ready and went to the reception preceding that night's show. Afterward, we learned the name of the hotel where much of the band were staying, and off we went. Almost immediately after we arrived 10:30 was close at hand, and we were about to turn into the proverbial pumpkins. We didn't really know anyone who was staying at that hotel who could order drinks for us. So what does one do in that situation? One walks up to the front desk and pays for a room so one and one's friends can continue drinking at the bar, that's what one does. (No, it wasn't me, but a friend of mine. You know who you are! And yes, we all chipped in and paid her back.)

So now my two friends and I had not one, but two rooms in two different hotels, not that it would do me much good in the sleep department. We hung out into the wee hours, and I had the most incredible strawberry martinis. I mean, just one right after the other. They were so good, it would have been a shame to stop drinking them. At least that's what I was telling myself.

When the bar closed at about 3:00 am we moved the party to the room of one of the Americans we knew. I was only able to stay there for less than an hour before it was time for me to leave. I had to take a cab back to our original hotel, the room where our luggage was, the room where I had spent a whopping, oh, one hour. I changed into more comfortable clothes and packed my bag and got a cab to the train station to catch a 5:30 am train back to the station near Heathrow. Keep in mind that I'm now running on a total of nine hours of sleep in four nights. I had had nothing to eat since lunch, which was about fifteen hours ago. Well, except alcohol calories, and somehow my stomach wasn't convinced that the muddled strawberries in the martinis counted as nutrition.

Do you know what it feels like to have nine hours of sleep in four nights and only one meal a day? Not good. Not good on any level. Take my word for it.

Once I got on the train I claimed a table, put on my headphones, and stayed awake due to nothing but adrenaline. Fast forward to about three hours later, and I was really starting to crash. By the time I reached my destination I was near comatose and my stomach was in revolt from lack of food. I went outside to the bus stop and couldn't find any information on the expected arrival of the bus to Heathrow. I waited outside in the cold in a state of extreme discomfort, afraid that if I went inside, I would miss the bus. When the bus finally did arrive, I was the only one on it. I hunched over in my seat, and the pure exhaustion and hunger combined to make me feel nauseous.

Because, you know, I wasn't feeling good enough already.

When I arrived at the airport at around 10:30, it was all I could do to handle my own suitcase. I was existing on autopilot and instinct. If you've never had an average of little more than two hours of sleep a night for four nights in a row and very little to eat, and been hungover to boot, consider yourself lucky. If you have, then you know that "tired" is not the word for what you're feeling - not even close. By that point you're not even feeling human; you're just a robot whose sole purpose is to do whatever needs to be done so that you can sit down someplace, anyplace, before you pass out, fall down, and spend the next twenty hours as a human speed bump in the exact place and position in which you collapsed.

I saw a place in the airport that had some prepared food and some tables, so I picked up a container of fruit salad and a bottle of water and got in line to check out. The cashier rang up my purchase and there was some dispute over the exact price and how much money I had and the fact that I had inadvertently gotten a bottle of still water instead of sparkling water, or vice versa...

See, I can't even remember the details. I do remember, however, making some barely audible, inhuman grunting noise with a face that was surely somehow contorted, and the poor cashier, not realizing that he was dealing not with me but with a comatose robot inhabiting my body, sighed and said, "Alright!" and let me go, probably grumbling something about American tourists.

Why the UN hasn't tapped me for a goodwill ambassador position is beyond me.

An hour later I took my seat on the plane. The last thing I remember was buckling my seatbelt. Later (and I have no idea how much later, Rip Van Winkle that I was), I awoke and noticed we were still at the gate. The pilot was making an announcement - something about a bad engine or leaking oil - something that if I had been sentient would have me saying my last prayers. I guess that was one good thing about being tired to the point of unconsciousness. Had the plane gone down over the Atlantic, I would have just woken up, gazed out the window, thought, "Huh, how about that?" and passed out again before we hit the water. Needless to say, my inability to sleep on planes was overcome, and it never felt so good.

Just wake me up in time for the next show.

Neither Here Nor There

I've found a dead horse in the back of my mind and decided it needs beating.  It's several years old, and had I been writing a blog at the time, I would have addressed it in a more timely manner, but there you go.  You see, I moved from New Orleans to Washington, DC, three months before Katrina, and though I was not living in New Orleans at the time that it happened, it affected me in a way that leaves the experience fresh in my mind.  But then, I also have Katrina programs and videos that I still can't bring myself to watch and a plastic bin full of mildew-smelling old photographs that are all stuck together, and I can't bring myself to deal with that yet, either.

Straight to the point.  After August 29, I was caught in limbo - my old friends in New Orleans knew that I wasn't experiencing what they were, and my new DC friends didn't get it.  Neither side could completely understand me, nor I them.  I didn't truly belong to one side or the other.  This only compounded my depression, because I didn't even have a camp with which I could fully identify.

For a month I lived on a steady diet of CNN and nola.com forums and not much else.  I awoke each morning with a fear of what new calamity might have befallen my city while I had been sleeping not-so-soundly.  I couldn't tear myself away from the TV - it was the only real connection I had to my former life.  I remember one of the first times (maybe the first) I left my apartment after it happened.  One of my new friends was going to Costco and invited me to come along with her.  Maybe she just wanted company, or maybe she knew on some level that I needed to rejoin the living.  I don't think I said much on our little outing.  I do remember passing by a Hyatt on our drive to the store and immediately pictured the ravaged New Orleans Hyatt (which still has not been renovated, by the way), and I sunk further down into my seat.  My eyes were squinting from the sun and I felt like a vampire being forced into the light, when I was feeling much more comfortable sequestered both physically and emotionally in the darkness.  I felt a kinship with my New Orleans friends and didn't want to see or accept that there was life outside of tragedy and that for most of America, it was as if nothing had happened.

I knew what I did feel, but what was I supposed to feel?  DC wasn't my town - I hadn't yet put down any roots.  New Orleans still felt like home, though I no longer lived there and felt as if I no longer had any rights of ownership, emotionally-speaking.  I was hurting as though it were my town that had been ripped to pieces, because it had, but unlike my friends who remained, my life was not disrupted.  And it's because of that that I felt as if I had no right to hurt - no right to grieve.  But grieve I did.  It's not as though I left nothing behind - my friends, my house, and about 95 per cent of what I owned were suspended in hell.  By checking Google Earth I could tell that the roof of my house had survived intact, but what about the windows?  Had rain blown in and mold turned everything twenty shades of green and black?  Had creatures of either the two- or four-legged variety taken up residence and used it as their home base?  And did they need it more than I did?  

And again, how could I complain?  I did have a roof over my head and steady income, which was more than just about any other New Orleanian could say at the time.  I wanted to mourn with my friends and commiserate with them, but how could I without having them think, "Why are you worrying?  You're not the one having to deal with this."  But still I felt more than just sorrow; I felt emotionally cut open, but with the added component of feeling as if I had no right to be.  I knew that my sadness was real rather than self-serving, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I hadn't earned it.  The people who were suffering and enduring, they had a full right to every thought, every feeling.  But even though I wasn't suffering as they were, did that make my feelings any less valid?

Even worse, an old friend of mine and I had already planned a short, three-day cruise to the Bahamas for the last weekend of September.

*Are you kidding me?  I lost my house.  I lost my job.  I'm trying to make a new life for myself in a different city and don't know if I'll ever be able to return home, and you're complaining that you had to go on a cruise?*

I know.  Let me explain.  See, I didn't want to enjoy myself.  I didn't think that I should enjoy myself.  And quite frankly, at that point, I don't think I was even capable of enjoying myself.  I just wanted to be left alone with CNN and my thoughts.  I spent more time checking out the news on the ship's internet than I did in the sun.

Vive la vacation.

The next weekend after I returned home, I went to New Orleans to check on my house and, well, everything.  I won't go into all of that, except to say that the house was in fine shape save for the busted iron gate in front.  The electricity, and therefore the air-conditioning, had been turned on.  So some people I knew had nothing left, and my house was fine, and I wasn't even living in it.  Happiness.  Relief.  Guilt.  How much of each and in what order, I couldn't say.

So my friends, with varying degrees of difficulty, overcame their obstacles and rebuilt their lives.  I set down roots in DC, though I still feel a connection with New Orleans that I don't think I'd feel with Washington if I lived here the rest of my life.  That's the hold that New Orleans continues to have on me.  And whether I eventually move back there or end up some place else, the city will still have a place in my heart, and I am emotionally invested in its well-being.

Torn?  Still, but to a lesser extent.  Hurting?  A little, but less than the city that has captured my affection.  In love?  Forever.

The Undesirable Club

No, I'm not talking about the A/V club in high school (of which, by the way, I probably would have been a member had my school had one).  I'm talking about a club no one wants to join, though everyone will at some point in their lives.  You can become a member at the age of one or seventy-one.  Participation is involuntary and irrevocable - lifetime membership, as it were.  I'm talking about the orphan club.  Now, the term "orphan" conjures up images ranging from the poverty of "Oliver Twist" to the optimism of "Annie."  The assumption is that the orphan in question is a child.  But the truth is that if you've lost both of your parents, you're a member of the club regardless of your age.

(I write this at the risk of appearing self-indulgent - the leader of a one-woman pity party.  I also realize that the tone contradicts the quote at the top of this page, but hey, happy people are human too, and sometimes you have to open the emotional valve and release some of the pressure.  It's a testament to the quote's accuracy that it took me a while to write this, because it takes some effort for me to access this place.  Yep, me and denial, we're good friends.  Maybe that's a bad thing.  Or maybe it's a necessary thing.)

I was thirty-three when I joined the club.  It could have been worse.  My brother was twenty-seven.  Come to think of it, my mother was also thirty-three.  Some legacy, huh?  Membership is actually a two-part process, and I don't know which is roughest, the shock of the first parent dying, or the finality of the second.  For me, the first part came when my mother died quite suddenly when I was twenty-five.  One morning you're having breakfast and going to work, and within five hours your life has changed forever, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The thing about the first stage of membership is that you know that when the surviving parent dies you will be left with none, and then begins the terrible waiting game.  You're not yet part of the group, but you can see the clubhouse clearly on the horizon.  And then it happens - the other shoe drops - maybe when you least expect it.  For me seven years passed between stages one and two when my father died, also suddenly, in 2002.  Seven years is a long time waiting for (no, "wait" is the wrong word), dreading when that second part will come.

I guess the reason I'm thinking of this now is that recently, a good friend's mother died.  A childhood friend.  Someone I've known since I was six.  She was already at the first stage, her father having died almost ten years ago.  Her mother had been sick for over a year, so it was not completely unexpected.  I actually saw her mother a few months ago at Christmas and knew it would be the last time we would ever visit.  That's a pretty somber feeling.  My friend called me the first week of March to tell me what had happened, and the next morning I was on a plane.

And the membership increased by one.

I remember that night after the funeral, my friend looked me right in the eye, and with the first tears I had seen her shed that day, choked back her sobs and said earnestly, "I still miss your mother, and it wasn't fair that she was taken from you so soon."  (Denial and dissociation, denial and dissociation.  Appreciate the sentiment, but don't think about it or the floodgates will open.)  So I just smiled and hugged her.

As I said, me and denial, we go way back.

Believe it or not, there are a few hard-earned benefits of membership.  Probably the biggest one is that mercifully, you only have to pay the entry dues once.  After you experience it, you never have to go through it again.  Another is the courage that comes from knowing you have little else to lose.  I'm sure you all have thought, at one time or another, "If something were to happen to me, it would just devastate my parents."  (Now how do I word this without sounding too indelicate?)  If they're already gone, you don't have to worry about how they would react if you were to meet an untimely end in, say, a bungee jumping accident.  (Not that I've been bungee jumping.  I haven't acquired that much courage!)

There's no way to prepare yourself for this club.  When you join, whenever that may be, you will travel precariously through a hellish tunnel, but you will come out the other end finding yourself to be a stronger person than you ever thought possible.  The knowledge that you can muster that strength will prepare you for anything else that may cross your path.  And in some strange, morbid, ironic way, you will have your parents to thank for those gifts of strength and courage.

Ferry Ride to the Twilight Zone

It all started innocently enough (famous last words).  We were vacationing in San Francisco and had read that the town of Alameda, just across the bay east of the city, had a nice, older neighborhood, and we wanted to check it out.  Now, you have to realize that we're old house junkies.  Not "old" as in "dilapidated," but "old" as in "cute bungalow or Victorian."  To illustrate this, when I was in New York City in November of 2001 at the time an airplane crashed in Rockaway, Queens, close to JFK airport, one of my friends called me to make sure I was alright.  When I asked her what in the world she thought I would be doing in Rockaway, she replied, "Well, for all I know there's some historical house there that you decided to visit, and a chunk of the plane fell on you."  Such is my reputation.

So we boarded a ferry and made the short trip to Alameda.  Kind of.  I think.

See, we were expecting something akin to Algiers Point in New Orleans - you hop off the ferry and within a block you're greeted by charming little houses that seem to say, "Now aren't you glad you came?  Wasn't it worth every second of the wind whipping past your face and drying out your contacts?"  Didn't turn out that way.  If there is in fact a nice old neighborhood in Alameda it is quite well hidden, at least to everyone naive enough to arrive by boat.  As we approached land, I saw what appeared to be a runway parallel with the shoreline.  Hmm.  On the opposite shore were dozens of cranes that unload shipping containers from freighters.  Hmm hmmm.  My hopes of cute houses just steps away were summarily dashed as I saw the waterway come to an end up ahead and noticed the boat slowing down and pulling up to a dock.

How can I best describe this...

Had we landed on the surface of the moon, there could not have been less human activity, but possibly a more-pleasing landscape.  There were no people save those who had just come from the ferry.  Some of them walked to their cars, some were picked up by friends, and others waited for the one bus that passes through the area.  There were no cabs and no businesses to walk to.  I saw a transit map posted at the stop, but there wasn't much time to examine it, as the bus arrived just seconds later.  There was a flurry of quick debate as to whether we should board a bus not knowing where it would take us, but we didn't seem to have much of a choice, so aboard we went.

The bus rumbled down wide, empty streets, past sprawling, empty buildings.  There were a few cars parked here and there, but I didn't see any people.  My brain actually developed a cramp as I tried to figure out not so much where this was, but what this was.  It looked like it could have been some kind of industrial park.  (Industrial park.  Now there's an oxymoron.)  I also saw signs indicating that this place had something to do with the military.  Either way, it was obvious that it was long since forgotten.  There were just a few people on the bus.  At one point, we stopped to pick up a woman holding her dry cleaning with her young son in tow.  I have no idea where she could have come from.  She paid her fare and took a seat right behind the driver.  That was the last normal thing that would happen for a while.  Less than a minute later, the bus stopped again, this time to pick up a man who, it turned out, was the husband of the woman who had just gotten on.

That's when the fun really began.

Apparently, the man and this particular bus driver had crossed paths before, and there was no love lost between them.  The man didn't have enough money to pay the fare, so he asked his wife for some money.  She dug through her purse and produced the required amount.  Now, the driver had not yet pulled away from the stop, and she was criticizing the guy for having insufficient funds, and he responded by saying that he knew his wife was already going to be on the bus and that she would be able to make up the difference.  They kept going back and forth, about what I wasn't really sure.  The man was putting the rest of the money into the fare box and the driver was just beginning to pull away from the stop when he said aloud, "The devil is present..."  The driver, aware that the devil in question was her, slammed on the brakes, causing the man to lose his balance and stumble.  The driver was livid.  She said that she was tired of dealing with him and that she'd had enough, and she didn't need to be spoken to like that.  She opened the door and ordered him off the bus.  The man and his wife, for their part, were chastising the driver for stopping suddenly while he was still standing, saying that he could have been injured had he fallen backward and tripped on the entry steps.  (They did have a point.  If he had been injured, either she or the city would have been liable.  Granted, he did refer to her as the devil, but it wasn't like he let loose with a barrage of profanity.)  

The entire time, I kept waiting for everyone else on the bus, all five of us, to exchange glances at the very least, but there was no reaction.  Is this such a common occurrence?  I had never experienced this on a bus before, not even in New Orleans (and that's saying something, because I've seen just about everything in New Orleans).  So now the driver was calling her superior and the couple, with both son and dry cleaning, had gotten off the bus and were calling the local transit authority to report the driver and file a complaint.  The driver told the couple that she was going to call the police, at which point the couple challenged her to beat them to it, as they were doing the same.  The rest of us passengers (Trapped people?  Hostages?)  were informed that we just had to wait for the next bus to come by and board that one;  the driver had to wait for the authorities.

We must have sat there for thirty surreal minutes, and I was just trying to process the fact that I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, and all I could think was, Oh my God.  She actually stopped the bus.  Are you freakin' kidding me?  (The uncensored version of this is my new favorite phrase.)  It's like when your parents would threaten to pull the car over, but you never thought they would actually do it.  The engine was turned off so there was no air-conditioning, though fortunately it wasn't too hot.  We managed to entertain ourselves by listening to the two aggrieved parties make their complaints to various people via cell phone.  We couldn't walk anywhere because we were still stuck on this moonscape (I've never been so glad in my entire life to not have to pee).  Eventually, the next bus arrived and we all got on, eager to make our escape.  At this point I didn't even care about cute houses - I just wanted to see something resembling civilization.  But, not knowing what else to do or where else to go, I asked the bus driver if his route took us through any quaint, older neighborhoods (I dare you to contain your incredulous laugh).  He told me which stop to take and that I would need to make a transfer.  Whew!  I was on my way!  Except not.  I assumed that I was still in Alameda until I started seeing signs that had "Oakland" in them.  Oakland?!  I didn't want to go to Oakland.  This was becoming too much.  I really didn't want to wander around Oakland without a map.  Alameda, yes.  Oakland, not so much.  When the bus made a stop in the middle of downtown, we made the decision to get off the bus and onto the subway.  Our desire to see charming houses had been drained from us.  Screw charming houses.  The next plan was, as long as we were in the general area, to take the subway to Berkeley and walk the short distance to a particular bookstore.  (Which, by the way, took us past two hydroponic shops right across the street from each other.  Leave it to Berkeley to have competing hydroponic shops.)

Now can somebody tell me which ferry takes me back to reality, and will there be any charming houses when I get there?

The Impossible Traffic Ticket, or, My First and Last Experience with the NOPD

There are stories that have sad endings.  There are stories that have happy endings.  More rarely, there are stories that end with you getting exactly what you want, though you wish you hadn't.  This is one of those stories.  

This little saga, which would end up spanning about seven months, began on what otherwise would have been a fine New Orleans day.  It was a spring morning in April '05, it was warm, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping (okay, so I didn't hear any chirping, but I'm sure some birds were whooping it up somewhere).  I was driving riverbound (that's "south" for you tourists) on a narrow street in the CBD.  (That would be "downtown."  I really should append this with a New Orleans/English dictionary.)  I was approaching Loyola Avenue, at which point I would be turning uptown. ("Uptown" is...oh, never mind.)  I was about a short block from the intersection.  The light was green.  The traffic stars were in alignment.  Everything was going well for my simple right hand turn.  Then I noticed a guy standing to the left on the curb near the intersection.  He looked up at me and, seeing exactly where I was, decided to run across the street.  Right in front of me.  Against the light.  Had I not applied my brakes, I would have hit him.  I gave a quick honk as if to say, "Look, pal, if you don't stop doing stupid things like that, you're going to get yourself killed.  You knew I was very close to you and still you thought it would be a fine idea to run right out in front of me."  (My car horn is quite verbose.)  Now mind you, this all occurred in less than five seconds.  After slowing down and thereby saving a life that apparently I cared for more than he did, I reached the intersection and looked right and noticed a female police officer on the sidewalk around the corner.  She had heard my audible protestation, looked up, and started walking.  I could have written the script from there....

WOOOOO!!!

There were the flashing blue lights, not thirty seconds later.  I had lived in New Orleans long enough and heard enough stories about the police department to know exactly why she was pulling me over, even though I had broken no laws.  Now, maybe you learned differently, but I was taught that if you're being pulled over, you should drive until you're able to park to the side, and that hopefully this won't last so long as to constitute a low-speed chase.  I couldn't pull over immediately because there was no free space along the curb.  So at this point I was on Loyola, the police car's lights had been on for about five seconds, and I reached a red light.  Sitting at the light, I noticed that there was an empty space along the curb just twenty feet ahead, so I decided that when the light turned green, I would pull up into that spot.  Which I did.  The officer thought of it differently.

When I parked the car and rolled down the window and she approached me, I was greeted with a tirade that even I wasn't expecting.  She began with, "Didn't you see me signaling for you to pull over?!"  Umm, yes.  Didn't you see me stop the car and do just that?  "I saw you almost hit that pedestrian!"  Yeah.  Did you also notice that the reason I almost hit him was because he ran right out in front of me after making eye contact with me?  Or that he was jaywalking as well?  Of course you didn't.  You were around the corner and a building was blocking your view.  All you saw was the guy running across the street and my car passing by, and you heard my honk, and you jumped to all sorts of conclusions.

My suspicions were confirmed.  That was exactly why she pulled me over.  She kept agitatedly repeating the same things, about how I didn't stop for her (at least not soon enough, I guess) and how I almost ran over that poor pedestrian.  I knew she was wrong.  I also knew that considering the state she was in, if I opened my mouth, my tail would be in OPP faster than you can say "power trip."  She finally walked away.  When she returned and I looked at my ticket, I saw that I was cited for failure to yield to a pedestrian and failure to acknowledge an officer's signal.  (That one I never understood.  I mean, I pulled over about twenty seconds after she turned on her lights.  It would have been less had the traffic light not turned red.  Maybe she would have preferred me to stop immediately in the middle of the lane and force her to walk out into traffic.  I was noticing a distinct pattern whereby I was caring more for other people's safety than they were.)  Not one to disappoint, she also cited me for driving without a seat belt, which I had unbuckled solely out of force of habit after pulling over and stopping the engine.  Of course I had my seat belt on when I was driving.  If she had been paying attention closely enough, she would have seen that, but then she also would have seen the guy run in front of me, and...ugh.  I'm just lucky there wasn't a child in the car, or she probably would have taken me for a kidnapper and slapped the cuffs on me right then and there.

Now, I'm one to admit when I've done wrong and accept my punishment.  If I take a gamble and park illegally and get a ticket, I pay it without complaint.  If I speed and get a speeding ticket, I take my lumps.  But to be accused of three misdeeds, none of which I had actually committed, well, that was something I could not accept.  I wanted to fight the ticket in traffic court.  One small problem.  I was to move to Washington, DC, in less than a month - well before the scheduled court date.  So I did something I hadn't done before.  I hired a lawyer to fight the ticket for me.  I put everything down in writing (much like I'm doing now) - the jaywalker, the tirade, the unconscious albeit foolish unbuckling of the seat belt.  I don't remember how much I paid him.  I just remember thinking that it was a small price to pay for officially clearing my name.  The court date arrived and passed and I received the verdict, mailed to me in June at my new address.  In a nutshell, I was cleared of any wrongdoing but in exchange, I had to pay $100.  I forget the legal term for it, but I believe the lay term would be "bullshit."  If I were officially found to have done nothing wrong, why did I have to pay a fine?  This went all against my finely honed sense of justice, but I would pay it.  What else could I do?

The fine had to be paid by some date in October, and I couldn't bring myself to pay it any sooner than the last possible second.  Of course, I don't have to tell you what happened between June and October of 2005.

Strangely, I was now more determined than ever to pay the fine, but I wasn't sure where to send the payment.  If I mailed it to the address printed on the back of the ticket, it wouldn't even reach the city.  I went online to see if there was some forwarding address for the civil court on the city's website, but I didn't see any.  So I decided just to mail these now much-needed funds to the address on the ticket, thinking (almost hoping) that they would be forwarded to the appropriate person, whomever that may be, wherever they were, and it no longer mattered to me how ill-gotten the money may have been.

The ticket and payment were returned to me in the mail a month later, undeliverable.

It turned out that I didn't have to pay the ticket after all, but I never wanted it to be this way, or for this reason.  The whole "K" incident tempered my anger toward that police officer - heck, damn near obliterated it.  Now when I think back to that day, I wonder.  Was her home destroyed?  Did she escape?  Did she lose everything she owned?  Did she lose her life?  I mean, I believe in karma, but that's a hell of a price to pay.  No one could, or should, have to pay that price, for anything.  And the survival guilt, which has been buried not-so-deeply beneath the surface for the past three and a half years, comes back with a vengeance.  I didn't want it to turn out this way.  To undo what happened, I would pay a thousand tickets, and my anger has been supplanted by compassion and regret.

And you can't put a price on that.

My House, in the Middle of My Street

So now that I've dated myself with a shameless (pathetic?) paraphrase of an '80s pop song, on to the subject at hand - neighbors.

I've always wanted to have good neighbors. A small, closely knit community of people who know each other, watch out for each other, and are genuinely interested in what's going on in each other's lives. For a very long while, this has eluded me. When you're growing up, the only thing you really care about is the number of children who live within a short walk or bicycle ride from your house. My neighborhood was severely lacking in this area, so I learned how to keep myself occupied.

But as I got older and began to rent and then own my own homes, I really yearned for a good set of fellow block-dwellers. You know, the type of people you describe first as friends and only secondly as neighbors. I have lived in a few apartment buildings, and my neighborly experience there has ranged from the guy in an adjacent apartment who smoked so much pot that it would waft through the wall outlets, at one point awakening me in the middle of the night with a contact high that left me feeling so sick that I prayed for quick, merciful death, to the family whose apartment emitted a much more pleasing odor - some kind of ethnic food that smelled so good, I was tempted to knock on their door and offer enough money to entice said cook to come be my personal chef.

Pot-induced nausea and kitchen odors. There has to be more to neighbors than this.

Fast forward to four years ago. (Fast forward to the past?)

I had moved to Washington, DC, from New Orleans (Yes, I left three months before Katrina. No, I'm not psychic. No, my house in New Orleans hadn't sold yet. No, there was no real damage to it. Yes, I managed to sell it.) After eight months in an apartment - the kitchen odor one, not the pot one - I moved into a house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Quirky it is not, but it does have character, nice architecture, and interesting people. Now, I couldn't tell you the first neighbor I met, or even when I first realized that I was living on a special block. I just know that any block that has two houses with picnic tables in the yard, and on any warm evening a collection of people will be sitting outside, drinking and eating, and being insulted if you don't come and join them, is a block I'm glad to be a part of.

The people on my street are, as my friends would say, "good peeps." They look after your pets while you're away, even if the request is made by text message as the pet-owner is about to board a plane (I've been on both the giving and receiving end of this). They tell you if they've seen a suspicious-looking person hanging around. They roll your garbage container out to the curb when you're out of town, and then roll it back after it's been emptied. They invite each other over for special dinners at Thanksgiving or Easter. And the advantage of having postage stamp-sized front yards is that we can all be out gardening on a summer's evening and still be close enough to each other that we can chat while we weed, and always with a glass of wine close at hand.

The picnic tables I mentioned, those are the life's blood of the block. There we gather and gossip, imbibe and inform. Anyone is allowed to join in at any time, though donations of wine, cheese, crackers, or anything else one might have on hand are always welcome! (We're a hard-drinking lot, we are.) One evening as a group of us were sitting outside, a woman was talking about working out. Then for some wine-fueled reason I challenged her to arm wrestle. She kicked my butt, but then all the other women at the table wanted to arm wrestle each other, and I'm proud to say that I won the next few rounds!

And the parties. Oh, the parties. House-warming parties, going-away parties, and in my case, Mardi Gras parties. Two years ago we had a block party to celebrate the life of a recently-deceased elderly neighbor, and even the mayor attended. Hell, once we even had an impromptu crime party (This is a story that's begging to be told.) Quick set-up. My block is shaped like a right triangle. My house is along the wider end of the triangle, so there is a house behind mine. But two houses down from me, the triangle narrows to the point that the houses extend through the entire block, so that the houses have a street entrance at both the front and the rear. Confused? Good. Now...

One evening about a year ago, I heard a police helicopter circling overhead. I went outside and saw some other people standing around and the police blocking off our street with yellow tape. Not a good sign. One of my neighbors said that something was happening over on the street behind ours, and since her house extends from this street to that one, we could all go inside her house and watch the action out of her back windows. So a bunch of us filed in, looked out the back windows, and saw a dizzying array of police vehicles converged upon a house across the street. I'm not talking about the Capitol Police, who, God love 'em, on any given day seem to do nothing more than stand a few feet out into the street on the corner so that you have to try very hard not to hit them if you're making a right turn. I'm talking SWAT cops with rifles. In fact, there was one cop with a rifle standing on the next porch just a few feet from our curious noses, rifle aimed and at the ready. But other than the incredible police presence, there wasn't much going on at the time, and someone suggested opening a bottle of wine. (I did mention we love our drink, right?) Not one to be fazed, my neighbor excitedly exclaimed that she had an intriguing bottle of wine that had been given to her by, you guessed it, another neighbor.

So the wine was opened and poured, and we're all drinking and looking out the window and waiting for something to happen across the street, and the only thing that's missing is a tray of canapes and a couple of guys slouched in the corner singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home." My neighbor, the hostess of the impromptu party, decided to walk outside and ask one of the police officers what was going on (a timid flower, she is not). The officer sternly told her, "Ma'am, take your cocktail and go back inside," probably mumbling to himself that he doesn't get paid enough to deal with the nutty citizens, much less the criminals. She related this to us and we all laughed, knowing the type of person she is and that that's the reason we like her so much. About an hour later, after the police had apprehended the culprit, we dispersed. Come to find out, this guy had stolen a car, led the police on a chase, crashed the car, and run into the unlocked (bad idea) back door of the poor unfortunate who lived on the next street. And we had a front row seat, each one of us glad that we weren't the victim.

Of course, there's more to a neighborhood than just the people; quality of life is also important. My area is nice to walk around and has lots of trees and pretty yards, small though they be. There's a great farmer's and flea market nearby. The crime isn't too bad except for the rare mugging and break-in. A few times some unsavory-looking types have knocked on my front door at night. (Do they really think I'm going to open it? I mean, what am I, from Arkansas or something? Oh. Right...) But for the most part, this is the best block I've ever lived on. And if anything bad ever does happen, I know that I have my wonderful neighbors - wait, make that friends - to turn to.

Now take your cocktail and go back inside.