I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(22)

I might have been aware of this had I taken the time to get to know our neighbors a little bit before waltzing into their lives in a rainbow prom gown.

Whenever you join a group of some sort, there’s an orientation period where you need to learn the lingo, observe the customs of the tribe, and gauge where everyone stands in the social pecking order. You’re provisional members, so to speak. You’ve got to hang around long enough for people to get used to you. You can’t just assume that because you’ve reached a particular level in the game of life, you immediately fit in with those who have been there much longer. Unless you’re me, in which case you point at the house and go, “I AM ONE OF YOU NOW. I BLOW LEAVES.”



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Having a home, I figured, means you belong. I belonged in a house made of bricks (because I read “The Three Little Pigs” and learned from it), a 1940s bungalow in the center of Atlanta. Our neighborhood was bordered by a creek on one side and a highway on the other. A historical marker sign indicated the site of a Civil War battle. We’d bought into something established. I was going to excel at homeownership.

That’s why, after we got a leaf blower and figured out the rules of supper club, we got a dog, followed shortly by another dog. Because two dogs is not just an accidental dog; it’s intentional dog ownership, and everyone knows you have to have dogs before you have babies, because being great at owning a dog is how you show the world you’re ready for children. Obviously.

Our dogs, two beagles named Frances and Phoebe, owned the following:

? One hairbrush, shared

? One sweater each

? Collar tags engraved with name, address, phone number, and rabies vaccination license number

? A large beanbag bed

? Developmentally appropriate toys, such as rubber domes with little holes in them that shook out treats at random intervals, thus stimulating the dogs’ natural foraging instincts and keeping their minds sharp, because who wants a dull-minded hound?

I interviewed several dog walkers before hiring Angela, a career walker who came with strong references and a well-articulated philosophy regarding canine individuality. She came to our house twice a day while John and I were at work and spent twenty minutes with the dogs each time. As per our agreement, she left page-long narratives about the day’s activities on a notepad near the front door. “We watched the trash truck today. Frances is getting faster at chasing squirrels. Two Milk-Bones at 3 o’clock. Phoebe likes the green ones best.”

The beauty of having a real house, not an apartment, is that you can just open the back door and let the dogs out, which I did every morning at 5:45 a.m., when John’s alarm went off and he got in the shower and I made my coffee. Such a well-oiled machine, this household.

We’d been in the house maybe two months when our neighbors called.

“Your dogs are waking up our kids,” the woman said.

“My dogs don’t know your kids,” I replied.

“Our bedrooms are right across the fence from your backyard,” she said. “Every time your dogs bark to come in, they wake us up.”

How rude, I thought. We didn’t know much about these neighbors yet other than that both the man and woman worked long hours, and their daughter and son looked to be . . . two-ish? Three? I had no sense of children’s ages. They weren’t babies, but they couldn’t drive. So whatever age that is. And apparently their parents didn’t like us.

“Those people hate dogs,” I told John.

“Maybe they don’t hate dogs. Maybe they just like their sleep,” he said.

“They’re so mean.”

Having thrown down what I saw as a completely irrational gauntlet, the neighbors made their disdain clearer by never complimenting me on my neat rows of leaf bags or my seasonal plantings in the pots by our front door. I couldn’t believe how unfriendly they were. And I couldn’t believe the woman kept calling me.

“It’s just that when I finally get them down to sleep, I really need them to stay asleep,” she said. “Could you maybe try letting the dogs in and out a different door?”

This was rich, I thought. She was trying to tell me which doors to use in my own house, when we both knew that their giant white cat had been prancing along the fence between our yards and taunting Frances and Phoebe, which was probably why they were barking.

“Maybe if you kept your cat in your yard, my dogs wouldn’t bark so much,” I suggested.

It was a classic border war. Cats versus dogs. Neighbor versus neighbor. As months passed, we developed a chilly stalemate in which they kept asking us to please quiet our dogs and we (okay, I) kept telling them to keep their cat to themselves, but nothing really changed.

The way I figured it, we were both homeowners with pets, and one household—the one that was not ours—was being awfully bossy toward the other one. I did not think about how I’d feel if somebody’s dogs were waking up my babies every time I put them to sleep. I had no babies; I didn’t get it. I didn’t comprehend how different my neighbor’s life was from mine, how much more she had to balance, how much more precious and rare her full nights of rest were.

When I’m being hard on myself, I call myself a bitch for how insensitive I was. When I’m being more understanding, I remind myself that no one can fully appreciate a life phase or experience they haven’t lived through. Someone might explain to you what it feels like, and even though you understand the words—they are all nouns and verbs you know; you know what a baby is, you know what sleep is—you don’t understand. You have empathy and intelligence, but empathy and intelligence have limits. So many arguments come down to saying, “Of course I understand what you mean,” while not understanding what the other person really means at all, because you can’t. Today-me tries to cut back-then-me a little slack.