Won't you be my neighbor?

Now that the weekend is over, I can look back and honestly reflect on how very, very short it really was. Lately it seems like weekends hurtle by at the speed of light. Friday evening we had a little picnic at the small park a few blocks away. Luna enjoyed lying on the grass while shamelessly begging for food (as opposed to the hard, uninteresting wood floor of home), Naomi enjoyed wandering toward the swings, only to be summoned back and forced to eat (more on her ongoing reluctance to consume food another time), and Jim and I enjoyed eating outdoors, which seems at once a celebratory partnership with nature and a defiant declaration of freedom from rain. Naomi has a puzzling relationship with swinging, which is to say, when she sees Woodstock swinging in the book he stars in (Hiding! Singing! Flying! Crashing!), she gets excited and starts to simulate swinging back and forth. When we get to the park, she gets excited and runs to the swings. When we get on the swing… she wants to get off. It’s more the idea of swinging she likes. Anyway, after a quick dinner and a few aborted attempts at swinging, we had to admit that it was getting chilly and saunter back home.

On the way back, we passed a house with a couple of young people outside. Out of nowhere, they started shouting things at us. I can’t remember all the things they said, but it’s difficult to forget the voice of the young woman saying, “You got a fat ass, girl!” That pretty well reflects the tone of the discourse. Such as it was. Jim was a little angry, I could tell, but for my part I just felt completely bewildered. It would have been weird if they had started shouting at anyone who had just happened by (as we did), without any provocation (that we could come up with). But doesn’t it seem weirder still that our little caravan (Mama, Daddy, stroller with cute grubby baby, big lovable [perhaps trained in attack?] dog) was the object of their verbal abuse? I suppose I am used to a little bit of special treatment as a person in charge of and in possession of a baby. People are generally more smiley and friendly when the baby is around. Come to think of it, the dog also has this effect. Yet even with the one-two punch of disarming likeability factors, we got the epithets. Isn’t it mysterious?

We kept walking, of course. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, dragging the dog and the baby into a street fight. I had a moment of superior dismissal for the behavior of our young alternate-Jerry Springer-reality neighbors, but the more I thought about it, the more I wished I knew the really truly right thing to do in that situation. Because after all, being a peacemaker doesn’t just mean saying no to a fight. It can also mean knowing how to love your neighbor when your neighbor is not being all that lovable.

Later, Jim assured me that my ass was not fat. Although, you know, what was he going to say?