This is either an extremely exciting week, an extremely busy week, or an extremely depressing week, a soul crushing span of five work days. In the winter, it’s easy to be a city dweller. City dwellers can hunker down, fight through winter, and maybe take a week vacation to somewhere warm. In the winter, we’re inside, and we’re mostly oblivious to the movements of those around us. That’s because in the winter we’d rather not look outside, not after the first few snowfalls, anyway. In the winter, we can draw our shades and scheme, brood, and wonder if where we are is where we should be. When we’re thinking and brooding, with those curtains drawn and our fireplaces crackling and snapping, it isn’t so easy to see that the Johnson’s slipped away on that Friday evening and didn’t return until Sunday afternoon. In the winter, it’s easy to pretend that everyone else is still at home.
This Friday, the blessing of obliviousness is no longer available. This Friday, there will be a great separating of the wheat from the chaff, and I will serve as the great winnower. This Friday, when you drive home from work, so late that the evening sky has grown dim, you’ll probably think everything is fine. You’ll go inside, you’ll say hi to your spouse, if you have kids you’ll try to remember to say hello to them as well, and then you’ll go back to your den and draw the shades, and in this, everything will seem normal. But the great exodus has already occurred, and you missed the great vacation home rapture because your phone was too stuck to your ear, your pedal to far down to the metal, your ambition blinding.
Yes, Friday morning, afternoon, and evening will be the same as they always are. There will be no guilt, no motivator, no feeling of crushing inadequacy. Saturday morning, you’ll awake. It won’t be like when those people in those television commercials awake, either. They wake up to streaming sunshine, with white blankets and white sheets, and make up. When their kids come into their room, they smile and laugh! So much fun to have children jump on the bed in the early morning! But that’s not like your Saturday, because your Saturday is a normal Saturday, like all the Saturdays that came before and most of the ones that will follow. You’ll rise, slowly, and I imagine you’ll put on a robe, because everything I know of city or suburban weekend mornings involve robes and sidewalks with newspapers on them.
When you walk to that paper, things won’t immediately seem out of place. Your grass is still green, your driveway still impeccable. Your hedges are a bit uneven, but you’re planning to call Jimmy this morning to let him know that you’re a lot of things, but you are not blind. He should come to fix those shrubs, and he will. Maybe Monday. In the mean time, you walk the sidewalk. Your paper is there, as it always is, wrapped in a red or blue plastic, the dew on side that faced down for the last hour or so, the hour that passed from when the delivery driver flung it from their window without hardly slowing down. Sometimes, the paper ends up on the lawn, or in the crooked shrubs, but this morning it was right on the sidewalk, right where you like it.
He threw the paper perfectly on your entire block, and the Johnson’s paper is on their sidewalk, too. But their paper is still there, and you overslept a bit, so it’s strange that they haven’t retrieved their paper just yet. You’re confused by this, because the Johnson’s are incredibly concerned about their paper, and they love to read it by morning light in that breakfast room that you can see from your back deck. You brush it off, perhaps they, too, overslept. Perhaps they weren’t feeling well. Perhaps they had a rough night with their kids, especially the one with the earring. You return to your own breakfast room, and read the morning drivel. Things, they seem fine.
You’ve decided the day calls for some gardening, but not hard-core-Amish-gardening. Just some weed pulling, and some snipping with those snippers you got from Restoration Hardware. The ones that came in that waxed canvas bad that says, in white stitching and in such a charming way, G A R D E N. You put on your gardening clothes, which are just like regular clothes except that you don’t mind getting a teensy bit of dirt on them, and you hit the garden. It’s a beautiful day, and the birds are chirping. Are those birds, or distant police sirens? You’re not sure. There’s a football in the Johnson’s back yard, just sitting there. Someone left it there not too long ago. It shouldn’t bother you, after all, it’s their lawn and not yours, but it’s just sitting there, out in the middle of the lawn. Something about it annoys you.
But there’s no one to complain to, because you can’t see any life next door. Was something wrong? Did some household mechanical system malfunction and spew carbon monoxide while the family was asleep? Did they all die? Are they in that house, right now, totally dead? That’s a horrible thought, so you dismiss it. Enough gardening, it’s lunch time.
You like to eat lunch on your deck, because it’s just so nice back there. I mean, it isn’t great, but it’s pretty nice. You like it. Your friends tell you they like it, too. So you eat a sandwich, and you look through the paper again, in case there was something important that happened, something that you missed. The football is still there. Mocking you. Why is it there? In the middle of that yard, with no one throwing it or catching it, or at least thinking about picking it up and putting it back in the mudroom lockers where it belongs. Your sandwich was fine, but admittedly it was not great.
The golf this weekend is boring, Tiger isn’t in the lead, because he’s never in the lead anymore. Phil isn’t either, because he either wins, or is second, or third from last. The broadcast hasn’t shown him all day, so he must be third from last. And that football is still there. Unmoved, untouched, in the middle of Johnson’s perfectly striped lawn. Maybe you should check on the Johnson’s. You’re not prepared to see them all dead in their beds, silent victims of that bird’s nest that clogged the exhaust pipe of that hot water heater? You’re not ready to see that, but someone has to be concerned. If we are not our brother’s keeper, we can at least check to see if our neighbors are dead. Courage gathered, you walk down your sidewalk, and then up theirs. You clear your throat, prepared to demand an answer as to where they have been. You knock. Rap, rap rap. Firm, but not aggressive, anxious but not anxiously.
No answer. Another, rap, rap, rap-rap. They extra knock might do it. Nothing. You have a key to their house, the extra one that you exchanged yours for a few years ago when you finally trusted them enough, and they you. Should you enter? Is this a violation of trust, or a neighborly necessity? You think better of it, and walk back down their sidewalk, and back up yours. The golf is still boring. The birds still chirping, or the sirens still whistling, either way. You can’t watch golf, but when you try to nap you think more of that football and the Johnson’s and less of Phill and his quadruple bogey that they finally showed. Second from last.
Maybe a call is in order. That’s nice, not intrusive. You could leave a voicemail for them, asking if everything is okay and if you’re still on for brunch tomorrow. That would be okay, not too controlling but certainly showing concern. You dial once, every number except the last one. Hang up. Don’t call. Why call? It’s just a Saturday, aren’t they entitled to go to the mall early and return late? Of course they are, but that’s not the point. The point is that paper still on the sidewalk and the football still on the lawn. You call. Ring. Ring. Ring. Voicemail, perfect.
This is the Johnson Family. We’re at the lake house this weekend, so leave a message and we’ll call you back on Tuesday, or try our cell. Happy Summer!
Click.
Why did Mrs. Johnson have to sound so darn cheery? It would have been easier to dial 911.
This Friday, it’s going to get a lot harder to pretend summer weekends spent in the city are fun. This Friday, perhaps you should be coming to the lake, if only to sit in the backseat of my car for a bit, and tour a few homes. This weekend, it’s the first weekend of unofficial summer, and it’s the first weekend in a long time that sitting in the city isn’t going to cut it.