Battle in the 'Burbs

Hey folks.

Sorry there was no post on Monday. It was a busy weekend.

One of the more eventful happenings was a throwdown in our neighborhood between two of the residents.

We live on a cul-de-sac in a planned neighborhood out in the middle of nowhere. We're a good 2-3 miles from town, but have lots of people in our area.

On the end of our street are 6 houses, including ours. 5 of the 6 residences have young, married couples. 4 of the 6 have young children.

On the corner is a lone bachelor . . . older . . . and unfortunately, very strange.

Refuses to acknowledge when anyone waves at him, says hello, or makes any sort of friendly gesture. Mutters at the neighbors when they are in their yard. Stares at everyone if they are outside talking in their driveways.

So apparently, the old guy's muttering and mumbling at people was getting on a lot of nerves. We could hear him making fun of the kids one day because they found a frog and were excited to watch it hop across the concrete.

Very passive-aggressive, antagonistic kind of stuff.

And even though we haven't been around for all the incidents, I guess the old guy's had more run-ins with the others in the neighborhood. So one of the neighbors, probably the newest to the area, finally had enough after the lone bachelor guy muttered something rude about his wife and infant son the day before.

The night of the big "brawl" the two guys met up at the end of their driveways with lots of yelling and cursing. And of course, we were all out on our driveways to see what the deal was. We kept expecting the police to show up because the confrontation seemed to be getting pretty heated.

Another neighbor stepped in to mediate the argument and see if there was any common ground between the two divided factions (all of us vs. the old guy). We hoped there might be some chance of making peace with this man.

After an hour and a half of getting nowhere trying to reason with this odd man, and finally determining he isn't playing with a full deck of cards, one of the wives went inside and called the police.

Ten minutes later the cops showed up, everyone went back to their houses, and the police got just a small dose of the strange man's personal brand of crazy.

So there will probably be more patrols in the area, and we'll see what happens with our unusual neighbor.

I hope you all have a good week.

Later.