loathe thy neighbor and lynch thy landlord

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a neighborly day in the beauty… would you be my, won’t you be my?”

One week before Christmas, 1995, my husband Tony, 1 year old son Sam, dog Lucy, cat Pywacket-rip and I, necessarily downsized our highfalutin L.A. lifestyle and moved into a cozy 2 bedroom, 1 bath dwelling in downtown Ventura. It’s not exactly a house but neither is it an apartment. For the first 6 years or so, our loud landlords and their equally loud Airedale Terriers lived behind and slightly above us. They liked to drink. In front and slightly below us, was a family of three with a teenage son who sold weed, a dad who worked the graveyard shift in a mental hospital and his wife who did time in jail for embezzilment. They had lived in their humble flat for more than a decade and were the best neighbors we’ve had so far.

I remember thinking, “Ten years? They’ve actually lived here for ten years?” See, this was supposed to be temporary. A transitional shelter until we got properly situated and more financially stable. It seemed utterly impossible that anyone would choose to spend so many precious years in what we optimistically refer to as “the shire.”

This past December found us eating our words.

In the past ten years the following has occurred:

1. The landlords moved yet replaced themselves with eerie replicas.

2. The new tenants became the property managers.

3. The family below us finally got busted for dealing drugs and were evicted.

4. We discovered a family of raccoons in the giant bush near the entry gate and I’ve been stalking them ever since.
5. A young couple moved into the unit beside/below us, moved 6 months later and were replaced by an older couple with a grown son. They live there now. His teenage girlfriend visits nearly every weekend with twin toddlers who shriek in tongues for hours at a time.

6. We marked Sam’s height inside his closet until he got too tall.

7. We redecorated and rearranged our living room furniture three times, our bedroom twice and Sam’s room more times than we can remember.

8. We’ve had our cars broken into twice (actually both times Tony left them unlocked. The second time all his CDs were taken), a bike lifted from our tiki porch and a license plate with new tags stolen.

9. We’ve endured numerous drunken friends of the landlords posing as roofers, plumbers and tile setters; a roof that continued to leak over Sam’s bed after it was replaced; annual rent increases “to keep up with the market”; continual invasion of our privacy; termites; spiders; a mouse; middle-of-the-night fireworks set off just a few yards from our front door; Saturday morning faith solicitors and all manner of aggravation, mental torture, inconvenience and disrespect.

This blog shall serve to document the crazy goings-on that make living here memorable as well as the spiritual wrestling brought on by the challenges of loving the unloveable: our neighbors.