Darkest Suburbia...and Beyond!

I'm not even going to look right now to see how long it's been since I posted here; suffice to say that any readers still left are fully justified in wondering if this really is a Frankenstein-like synthetic version of me here at the keyboard.

No such luck (although I could in fact use one or two upgraded or otherwise rejuvenated body parts). It's still me, still living the quiet life in Darkest Suburbia™, still puttering away on various projects (and behind on entirely too many of them).

Now, though, it's time to see if I can, in fact, jumpstart this journal (and the Web site I've been haphazardly rebuilding since changing hosts a year or so back). One reason - my ebook publisher, Uncial Press, changed hands twice late last year (initially sold to a larger ebook house, which was then bought by a print publisher whose business model thus far seems...at best non-optimal for ebook authors).

I'll attempt to supply updates on a more regular basis going forward (and to keep that promise rather more successfully than the last two or three times I said that)....

In the meantime, there are dishes to wash, lunch to make, words to type, et cetera. Hi-yo Silver, away!!

[No, I don't really have a horse; that would be against HOA rules....]

It's Tuesday night; your narrator has just stepped out the door on the way to the bus stop, so as to catch the last bus to work for his usual overnight shift. The door, as it's been trained to do, swings shut behind him...

...and my hand slides into my right front pocket, where there is no key ring.

Uh-oh.

On the one hand, this is a serious problem for a one-person household in Oregon whose closest spare key is located in southern California. On the other hand, it's a five minute walk to the bus stop, the bus is due in thirteen minutes, and it is in fact the last bus of the night.

I walk to the bus stop, establishing as I wait for the bus that no, my brother will not be coming up from Los Angeles to let me in tomorrow morning. We discuss the feasibility of replacing the lock with a fancy keypad model...

...and meanwhile, the bus mysteriously fails to appear. I check the GPS-driven app on my phone, which shows that it should be along in one minute - but it's a scheduled one minute, because the bus's GPS is evidently offline.

One minute fails to produce a bus. Five minutes fail to produce a bus. I check the app in an attempt to discern whether the bus somehow slipped past me while I was texting my brother. The app reports that the bus should be somewhere between my stop and the stop where I get off. It becomes obvious, however, that wherever it went, the last bus has ended its run without picking me up.

Clearly, the universe is conspiring against me. I sigh and make two phone calls, one to work and one to Uber. Impressively, the Uber driver is reasonably prompt and I am only slightly late for work, although without my key ring I can't get into my locker, where some of my usual work gear lives. The universe is also out to get my immediate supervisor; another co-worker has called in sick, and we also discover we have about twice as much work as there was supposed to be for this particular shift. Nevertheless, we persist, and the work mostly gets done in timely fashion.

Now it's time to come home - but how to get in? I have a light-bulb moment; I've recently learned that our HOA has a garage in which various odds and ends are stored, including assorted tools and such. It occurs to me that given our recent hot weather, and given that my condo is a second-floor unit sadly lacking in air conditioning, I've been leaving the glass sliding door to my balcony open at night for better airflow. (The sliding screen door is not open; I'm not inclined to let in the neighborhood squirrels or the occasional visiting goose.)

Possibly, I think to myself, the HOA will have a ladder in the garage, whereby I can climb up, get onto the balcony, and let myself in.

My brother points out via text that I am gaining ground on Lewis Carroll's Father William, and that perhaps I ought not be scrambling around on rickety ladders at my age. (Neither of us mentions that I have had an explicit warning from my doctor not to scramble around on ladders, rickety or otherwise, while one of my current prescriptions is still running.)

This discussion takes long enough that it's no longer too stupidly early to knock on my next door neighbor's door, on the off chance that I actually did give him a spare key when I changed my locks a couple of years ago. We establish that no, I wasn't that bright. However, my neighbor knows exactly which of my other neighbors is (a) on the HOA board, and (b) has the key to the garage in which there may or may not be a ladder. And wonder of wonders, the other neighbor is home!

Better still, we establish that there is, in fact, a ladder of sufficient height in the garage to reach my second-floor balcony. My two neighbors and I are, shortly, standing next to the base of said ladder, which is neatly extended up to said balcony. We look at one another. "John," my next door neighbor asks, "are you sure you can make it up that ladder?"

On the one hand, advancing age notwithstanding, I announce that I feel perfectly capable of climbing the ladder. However, the board member and custodian of ladders eyes me critically, and inquires, "Would you like me to climb up there, get in, and open up the door?"

I contemplate the ladder for a moment, and consider what the doctor is likely to say should I happen to fail my saving throw versus landing on my head as I swing over the balcony railing. "That's probably a good idea," I reply.

The other two of us watch - with my neighbor helping to steady the ladder - as the board member scoots with ninja-like efficiency up to the balcony, swings with monkey-like deftness over the railing, and takes all of two and a half seconds to defeat the screen door. Another thirty seconds find me back around at the front of the building, greeting him with effusive thanks as he emerges from my front door. Clearly my neighbor and board member is a bona fide ninja, and I have been saved from having to call a locksmith. [Clearly I also need to do some serious baking, preferably before the next heat wave arrives in a week or so.]

For the moment, in any event, the universe's conspiracy against me has been defeated, and life in Darkest Suburbia is back to its usual state.

# # #

A neighbor of mine here in Darkest Suburbia walked up to his apartment door late one afternoon this past week to find a cheery little yellow flowered gift bag on his doorstep. Inside were (a) a box of six snickerdoodle cookies (his mother’s favorite), (b) a box of orange spice tea bags (ditto), and (c) a handwritten note, reading as follows:

Scott,
I thought your mom would enjoy these treats. 🙂  Thanks again for your time last week.
— Dani

A friendly, thoughtful gesture? Well, possibly…

…except that Dani has never met Scott’s mother. Dani works for a local senior living community which offers memory care, and Scott has been busy for the past couple of weeks touring a number of memory care institutions. He’s looking for a suitable facility for his mother, Adele, who has been diagnosed with dementia and now needs more specialized living arrangements than her current caregivers are able to provide. It isn’t practical for Adele to come and go on these scouting visits, so Scott has been doing this on his own.

Now as it happens, there was also a phone message from Dani on Scott’s answering machine:

Hi, Scott, this is Dani from Northmont at Bonny Slope; I just wanted to let you know that I was running some errands and I dropped off a treat for your mom at your apartment — I’m sorry I missed you. It’s in a yellow gift bag and I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.

The stinger here is not that Dani knew Adele’s tastes in cookies and tea; that came up in the conversation she and Scott had while he was touring the Northmont complex. Similar conversations had happened on all of Scott’s tours, though he recalls the one with Dani as a little more probing. No, the salient details are that Scott’s home is several miles away from the Northmont in an unlikely direction for errand-running…and the cookies came not from the upscale supermarket bakery just down the road from Scott’s place, but from the one just across the street from the Northmont. Scott was also a little surprised at the timing of the gift; he had taken a more conventional follow-up phone call from Dani a day or so earlier, and had let her know at that time that he was at least a week away from making a decision. The inevitable conclusion is that the “gift” is more marketing tactic than act of spontaneous generosity.

What’s more difficult to decide is whether the gesture is merely awkward or outright stalker-ish. Scott can’t simply hand over the gift to Adele, who has no context for — and limited ability to understand — why a total stranger would send her cookies and tea. (It’s also worth noting that some memory care patients need supervision where eating is concerned, so that any gift of food is potentially problematic.) Accepting and presenting the treats as his own is, if not strictly dishonest, at least a little disconcerting. And where complimentary goodies are usually perfectly good marketing tools, most of the time they’re usually presented as just that — not as a gift to someone not yet involved in the sales conversation.

For my part, I sincerely doubt that Dani’s intentions were anything but benign. But in the circumstances, it’s clear that her arrival on Scott’s doorstep was more purposeful than spontaneous. And that makes it much too easy for her gesture to be misread as genuinely creepy rather than professionally over-eager. It’s an error in judgment that does the Northmont no favors as Scott ponders the best facility for his mother, and an oddly aggressive marketing tactic in an industry where demand is high enough that many facilities often have long waiting lists.

Indeed, Scott reports that he’s more or less taken the Northmont off his list for reasons mostly unrelated to the gift drop-off. But that’s left him with a new problem: now what’s he supposed to do with the cookies and tea?

I may just volunteer to eat the evidence.

There is a pantry/closet in my kitchen, next to the refrigerator, in which I keep a great variety of things.  There are old cardboard boxes, decks of playing cards, boxes of papers, a small cooler chest, my collection of Christmas supplies (tags, ribbon, stockings, gift wrap, etc.), aprons, decks of cards, light bulbs, the backup paper towel supply, assorted surplus groceries (I probably have enough boxed pasta just now to last me until approximately next Memorial Day) and my vacuum cleaner.

It is, in short, very full, though not so full as to produce a Fibber McGee effect.  Imagine my startlement, therefore, when I opened the pantry door late this morning...

( ...and a cat leaped past me from inside the pantry. )

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I am in fact a resident of Darkest Suburbia (for metaphorical values of "darkest").  While I'm technically inside the Portland city limits by a few hundred yards, my neighborhood is interspersed with some moderately dense forest and steep hillside.  Forest Park proper is over some of the hills and on the other side of a freeway, but you definitely don't have to go over the hills and far away to find woodlands -- and, correspondingly, woodland creatures.  Indeed, some months ago I spotted a raccoon in my back yard.  And when said raccoon noticed that I was watching it, said raccoon cheerfully clambered up onto my back porch and came over to look at me through the glass window in my back door.  This is a little friendlier than I like my woodland creatures, notwithstanding a childhood in which I happily read about a raccoon named Ranger Rick in one of the magazines my parents ordered for me.  After making a brief investigation of my back porch, the real live raccoon went on about its business and did not return.

( Or so I thought.... )