Why I Love My Neighborhood, Again

I stepped out of my front door, set my cello on the porch, closed the door behind me, reached into my pocket for my keys, and remembered they were on the little stand in the hall.

Fortunately, I do this often enough that I keep a spare house key in the car.

Unfortunately, I've recently gotten into the habit of locking my car doors, even though it took me five years after finding part of a broken pipe on the floor one morning.

Fortunately, I could see that I had left the driver's side unlocked this time.

I smiled at the sun, took up my cello and got ready to go to N-'s house to practice a duet we'll perform in February.

In the next two minutes of loading in, I started to daydream about planting the seeds I bought last week, which led me to think about my new knowledge that regular dirt is unhealthy for some seeds, which made me wonder if M- would believe me, which got me thinking about whether it's women he doesn't like to agree with, or just me, which made me think about M-G-'s husband and how he probably agrees with her lots but I wouldn't want to be married to him anyway.

I shut the passenger side door with my cello in place, walked around the front of the car, and was struck by the hazy memory of having pressed the lock button.

Yup, I was now locked out of house and car. A quick mental inventory of our home's windows revealed that my typical break-in routes were no-gos. Miraculously, I had not left the phone inside either house or car, so I called N- to tell her I would be very, very late.

And here's why this post is about my neighborhood: I walked down the street to C-'s house, where she took me in and offered me a cup of tea. (Note to self: give C- a spare house key.) We sat at her kitchen table, drank Rooibos tea, rubbed the dog's head, and talked about jobs, the economy, our kids' schools. The sun shone through a cut glass pendant in the window and made a rainbow on the floor.

Even the small act of getting up to wash the dogsmell off my hands at her kitchen sink without interrupting our conversation made me feel happy. No need for those funny gestures, aiming one's hands in the direction of the sink while airwashing them, raising one's eyebrows, saying "May I?" as one would do in a mere acquaintance's house. The kitchen sink, sort of a personal altar, is not something to use lightly.

Eventually 1 came home from school with a key and I went along to my duet practice.

Flight

I entered the desolate stairwell at work and saw a lone little brown leaf on the floor, then had that odd feeling, when knowledge overlaps perception, for in the next demi-instant I saw that it was a bat, too dark brown to be a leaf; also, somehow I felt it was still alive.

I nudged it with my toe, and it gave a crackling hiss, feebly twisted its angular wings. It was clearly injured, and angry. I wanted either to gently scoot it out of the way or to kill it bloodlessly. I touched it again with my boot, to make sure it wasn't going to suddenly spring into flight. It hissed again. I would have been afraid if I were a small animal, and as it was, I felt so unsettled by this bat, even though I knew it couldn't hurt me, that I left it where it was and went up to the office.

Someone took a box down, turned it over the bat and pushed it off to the side. Later, after a call to Animal Control ("What I'm gonna need for you to do is to put it in a plastic bag"), I found a Dollar Tree bag and a vague determination to be decisive. No one in the office had leather gloves.

The bat was weaker. I leaned closer and saw its tiny pointed ears and flat nose shaped like the roof of a pagoda. Its wings and pillowy body were crushed indeterminately together. This flying mammal: how different from me. It turned its head back toward me, just barely, and gave a hiss more like a sigh.

It took me three or four tries to grab the small bundle of its body without flinching, my hand inside the bag like a glove. Such an ugly shroud. I tried to jostle the bag slightly so the bat wouldn't be on its back as it waited to die.