Commentary
That odd moment arrives when, after the plane clears the runway and the wheels come up, the pilot banks and gains altitude, the rough ride becomes smooth, and the anxiety of takeoff passes. As for me, I take that moment to try to find my house down there in the briar patch. I know it’s down there in a row of houses somewhere, nestled safely among rows of streets, barely differentiated among city blocks and town roads and landscape shadow and light, and the disorientation of anxiety and altitude and speed hide where I live. Yet someone sends me a tax bill for the privilege of living in that house, and I volunteer to submit payment.
Local election season has rounded the turn from third to home, and I have to spend precious mental calories considering which aspiring lord I will vote for. The last guy promised the moon, raised taxes to acquire it, then stole a bunch of the money through his brother’s business. Brazen, but ho-hum. Polls say he has a chance to be re-elected, but, then again, his opponent has signs in all the right yards. One of my down-street neighbors is running for ward councilmember, and he’s a genial fellow whom I’ve known for fifteen years—he has watched my children grow toward adulthood—but dangit all! He’s got the incumbent crook’s sign in his yard!
Speaking of my children, on a regular basis I get to watch the two youngest ones frolic about and play. It really is a special thing to me as the tree of my life begins to shed the final leaves of my youth. When they’ve figured out what they want to do separate from each other, the moments pass as pleasantly as a Wordsworth poem, but somehow those moments corrode into Napoleon’s scouring of Europe, the shrieks of the little one as Belarusian villages rising with Napoleon’s fires of the older one, who has, apparently, stolen the only useful Lego rectangle in the universe, even though a box of Lego rectangles is at hand. And what do I do, here in my little hollowed-out space within the briar patch? I yell, coming over the top, in an effort to dominate. Like father, like sons.
Anyway, my across-the-street neighbor lost his councilmember seat in 2017, so, to punish us, he’s been parking his van across two parking spots on the street, right in the middle of the shady spot. When we called the police to complain, they told us that there was no ordinance against occupying two parking spots. We had no choice but to call the police, see; he’s creating a cascading event, occupying two spots like that, with the result that oftentimes, in the middle of the day, there’s no parking for half a block! We have to park around the corner! He’s since weaseled his way back onto the council via appointment. Kudos to him. He’s one of my lords now, and I’m glad my taxes are collected from an attention-free escrow.
Nevertheless, he’s made himself a clearing with his elbows, down here in the briar patch. It’s his parking spot, his appointed chair, and his city-wide notoriety, at the small expense of our dirty looks through bruised eyes. Besides, what’s a few dollars per capita siphoned off by the mayor’s brother into the mayor’s pocket? Better via escrow than shotgun under the chin. I wonder how I’d pull off the heist when the corruption touches me.
It’s a tricky business to love your neighbor as yourself. If you want to love your neighbor, you’ve got to have something with which to love him, much more than encouraging words. “You wanna use my drill press?” is far more in the way of love than “Jeez, I sure hope you find someone who has a drill press.” To acquire the drill press in the first place, however, is to throw a few elbows around, to clear out some space to make a living on your own reputation.
Moreover, my neighborhood is almost a hundred years old now, and I moved in lately, part of the fourth generation here. The briars were already thick and brambly, and it took no end of thrashing about to come clear, with all the resulting bruises, scrapes, and ill-will. It’s easy to lend my one neighbor my drill press; after all, he looked after my kids when I had to drive my wife to the hospital in the middle of the night. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he did know I was trouble that way, and he did it anyway. If my across-the-street neighbor who occupies two parking spots with his van out of spite asks me for my drill press? I dunno…
Journal Entry
November 5
Last time out was an interesting experience. Mike and I are across the road now because his property has been “blown out,” as the saying goes, emptied of deer by a combination of human industry (someone is cutting new trails every evening on an adjacent property) and natural phenomena (those coyotes and foxes). No one has hunted across the road with any seriousness for several years [author’s note: we came to find we were sadly mistaken about this], so all the edge habitat has grown over with thicket, thick thicket.
First, I had to do some scouting through it, then, once I decided on a spot, I spent roughly an hour cutting a cocoon in the thicket, about five yards back, and then an opening to the field. It is a perfect observation post: I saw two separate doe herds come and go, a flock of turkeys (three days after their season ended), then the regathering of both doe herds, which drew the attention of a sizeable buck, which spent an hour practicing culling individual doe from the herd. They never came near. Alas.
The point is: I spent my writing time carving out that little zone, a place for myself. The intense labor of doing so reminded me that the world is a kind of thicket. Some of us are content to live in a cocoon. Some of us want more space for more people. Others yet desire to build a kingdom or an empire. I suppose the question is whether we dominate one another in acquiring personal space.
