Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never by Lancaster, Jen (e books free to read .txt) 📕

“Tell your kid to stop pushing it.”

Shrug. “She like.”

“I don’t like.” I pointed at the window beside the door that had since become opaque with doggie nose smudges and slather. “They don’t like. No one like.”

Shrug. “She like.”

While I stood shaking in impotent rage and the dogs clawed the door, the kid got bored and the mother moved on.

A few days later they came around again, pulling the same stunt. Only this time instead of arguing, I simply released the hounds. They tore down the steps and bolted right up to the fence. If you have a single clue about dogs, you’d immediately be able to tell that Maisy and Loki were barking with unadulterated joy and nothing could have made them happier than a quick ear scratchy-scratch. Their tails were wagging like crazy, making a clanging noise against the bars of the iron fence, and their ruffs were completely smooth.

But if you’re a fucking dolt who believes it’s your right to ring and re-ring my bell, an understanding of dog behavior may not be in your wheelhouse. While they beat a hasty retreat, I stood at my gate shouting, “What? You don’t like?”

Up here, anyone who wants to ring my bell has to take one hundred and fourteen paces to get there from the mailbox. [Related note: sometimes an entire week goes by before I pick up my mail.] Plus, we don’t live walking distance to anything (save the railroad tracks) so there’s almost no foot traffic, which means that in moving here, we’ve neatly eliminated external distractions. I can literally sit at my desk and not be disturbed for hours… except maybe by my tree-cutting bloodlust and the lure of Internet gossip.

So my return to neighborhood watch is completely inadvertent. I’m reading the local online community newsletter, which is a perpetual source of comedy, particularly the police beat. Whereas the crime blotter in the old ’hood routinely detailed grisly crimes best suited to an episode of a fine CBS drama, the new one comes straight out of Mayberry. Folks are always calling 911 on reports of found bicycles and raccoons trapped in garages. Last fall there was a real crime wave when an elderly man dialed 911 after waiting an hour to see his primary care physician and then didn’t receive an adequate checkup. [Police advised him to find a new doctor.]

As I scan the blotter, I notice an entry about a traffic stop close to my house. I remember that day because the police pulled up next to my mailbox to issue the ticket and… I may or may not have lain on the floor of my dining room watching the action unfold from behind the curtain sheers.

But come on, how can a traffic stop in my driveway not be intriguing? In a town where the greatest transgressions involve wearing white after Labor Day and improperly tasseled loafers, any police action is interesting.

So I do a little Googling. If there’s someone in the community, say, not properly RSVPing, then I’m a part of this community and I should know.

Then I Google a little more. Pretty soon I’ve wasted an hour clicking around the Facebook page of the poor bastard who’d forgotten to renew his city sticker.

I’d like to say I stop here.

I don’t.

Constant Vigilance™ returns with a vengeance.

Soon the police blotter becomes my National Enquirer/Page Six and my snoopy nature takes on a decidedly white-collar feel. Each week I find myself nosing around for more and more information.

For example, did you know that the guy who made an illegal turn on red at Waukegan Road gave money to the Green Party? That boy who was caught driving drunk on Gage Lane? According to Zillow.com, he lives in a multimillion-dollar home with (what I believe to be) overly permissive parents. And don’t even get me started on what I’m sure was an inside job in that big ol’ mansion a couple of miles up the road from here—I mean, how else would thieves have known about the hidden safe?

While I step up neighborhood patrol, Fletch involves himself in an entirely different kind of hobby. One of the reasons we bought our house is because our basement has higher than usual ceilings. Someday we’ll finish it off and make it into a rec room, but for now, it’s the perfect size and shape for a woodworking shop. As he’s been looking for a project, I suggest he refinish an old dresser that I’ve been dragging around from musty basement to dusty garage for fifteen years.

Originally, I planned to paint the dresser myself.

Until I saw the spider.

Correction, spiders, whereupon I immediately morphed from the strong, independent, primary breadwinner to a prototypical fifties sitcom wife, tottering around helplessly as though deeply encumbered by heels, a frilly apron, and the right to vote.

“This will take, what, two or three days?” I ask as we inspect the lines of the old dresser. I’m pleased that his new hobby is actually useful. A few years ago when he was into Airsoft, our house turned into a veritable Army Surplus store, with uniforms and BB guns all over the place. I always thought I was going to break an ankle slipping on one of the ten million white pellets on the basement floor left over from his target practice. But this? I could be very happy having a husband who builds stuff and doesn’t accidentally hobble me while I do a load of laundry.

I imagine all the cool projects he’ll undertake, like constructing a lighted hutch where I can display my Carnival and Depression glass pieces. [If you’re doing any birthday shopping, I’m all about orange Carnival bowls/vases and the pink Jeanette Floral Poinsettia pattern in Depression glass. But, really, only if it’s my birthday.] A few years ago he’d have insisted on storing his Airsoft rifles in our kitchen gun cabinet [No, I’m not kidding about the cabinet or his proclivities.] but now he’ll have the tools to turn it into a