A conversation with a neighbor

The baby was up a lot last night, but at least she finally seems to have kicked the flu.

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I mentioned yesterday that someone was knocking on my front door. Well, one visit was my mother-in-law, another was a neighbor.

After some hiccups last spring when we moved in (we were reported to the city for a parking violation and for running a 'day care' - sorry for breeding but it isn't a daycare, they're all mine) we've become friendly with quite a few folks on the block.

The family to our north has shoveled my walk and I've returned the favor, the guy two doors down has visited and given the kids some DVD's ('DVD Guy!' they call him), and I'm on conversational terms with some houses across the alley.

The guy to the south is still the guy to the south, but not wanting to be my buddy isn't a sin. At least not in this state.

[irrelevant aside: DVD guy has a bad habit of knocking whenever I'm sans shirt, man boobs visible to the world.  To point out how much this bothers me Lisa often says, half seriously, that she's confident I'm not having an affair because it would tend to include taking my shirt off in front of someone new.]

Anyhow, while selling Girl Scout cookies with YaYa Lisa meets some old guy down the street and winds up sitting in his kitchen talking to him for half an hour.

It turns out he knew my Great-grandparents (the prior owners of our house) and much of my family, including my maternal grandfather.

In 2002, for my Grandmother's 79th birthday,  I wrote a book about that Grandfather entitled Little Grandpa. I self published a few copies at a local print shop and submitted it to a few places. Rejections across the board, although one editor was kind enough to include a note saying it had potential but didn't meet their needs.

And so it stood for six years.

Back to the present. Lisa dispatches YaYa home for my copy of the book, no questions asked. She then borrows the guy my book, not realizing it is the only remaining copy I have my hands on, and that the digital files were corrupted in the intervening years.

I was . . . annoyed.

But true to her prediction he returned it and was one of the visitors yesterday. We went to his house and talked for awhile in his kitchen.

"So what did you think of the book?" Lisa said.

"To be honest, it's full of inconsistencies," he says.

Well. Okay then.

Apparently he was friends with my Grandfather's stepbrother and was bothered by his absence in the book, and some factual errors about who lived where in the city and who married when, etc.

"Well, he says right at the start that it's the remembrances of a 9 year old boy. It was never intended as a history book," Lisa said.

"Sure, sure," he says.

Ok, enough sour grapes. Whatever my opinion of his review, he was still a friend to a hero of mine, a hero I last saw in 1983.

Turns out they were both lathers and worked for my Great-Grandfather Iggy. They'd meet him on 13th and Lincoln each morning to get their assignments, often accompanied by their daily pay in a cash envelope. They'd take turns driving to the job site.

Considered the equivalent of the starting lineup, my Grandpa and my neighbor would often start an empty room and put up the ceiling and top layer of the walls.

He was quick to point out that my grandpa was a friendly and well-liked man, right in line with my memories, but also quick to say that he wouldn't 'take guff from anyone' and had a mouth when need be.

Most of the time I remember him bowing to my Grandmother's wishes, but come to think of it some kids once tossed a brick at his car and danged if he didn't u-bang and go after them, arthritis or no arthritis.

He also said Iggy was a fair and well-liked man. That's good to hear. I don't hear much about my Great-Grandfather.

So I suppose I'll go visit the neighbor again, this time with recorder in hand, and maybe fix some of those 'inconsistencies'.

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Lacking a better place to put it, if you are in Milwaukee and a Time Warner customer, channel 201 is a great nostaligic station, playing endless old TV shows interrupted only by commercials of the era.

May I say two things: One, The Mary Tyler Moore Show still holds up as a well-written and funny sitcom nearly forty years later (but c'mon - Murray wasn't gay?) and two, in her previous stint in The Dick Van Dyke Show . . well, thank God for capris. No wonder she was popular. ;)

Oh, and #532 is non-stop PBS Kids. Smiley loves it.