Buddy: A Character Sketch

People can be annoying, strange, or just plain old interesting. Take our neighbor, for example. I’ll call him “Buddy.”

Buddy, probably about 55, married our neighbor and moved in with her about three years ago. He at times has been so in love with his wife that he calls–yells–after her even after she has gotten into her car and started driving away to work at Walmart (he, I suppose, is a homemaker), “I love you! I love you!”

He and his wife have a dream of moving to the country; their own house was on the market for a while but didn’t sell. They’ve recounted one interesting house hunting story to us: It was a cute house, just what they wanted, and affordable, way out in the country. They loved it, but only until they saw in the yard of one of their potential neighbors-to-be a small pavilion-like cage housing two real-life tigers. “Uh-uh,” they decided. “What if a tiger got out and ate our dogs?”

Dogs, indeed. They have two of them, including one I’ll call “Ronnie.” Ronnie and his playmate bark and bark at anything or nothing when they’re outside. I’d bark, too, if I were a collie or part husky and had only a small, fenced-in lawn to call my own. Buddy barks, too. Not literally, but if we’re out back tending our garden, hanging up laundry, or retrieving our bicycles from the shed, and the dogs start barking, which is whenever they, too, are outside, Buddy competes with the racket by hollering out the back door, “Ronnie! Ronnie! Get in here! That’s not nice! Come here, Ronnie! Stop barking, Ronnie! That’s not nice! I’m going to make you come in here! Be quiet Ronnie! Get in here, Ronnie! You better listen! Ronnie, come here!” all to no avail.

Buddy sometimes talks to us out of his bedroom window. Maybe we’re out weeding, or trimming, and it’s early, say 8:00 in the morning. “Good morning!” he’ll call out of his window. “Nice day, ain’t it? I used to have a garden. Loved every minute of it, all those healthy vegetables–and the work, I loved the work. Have you been biking lately? That’s what me and my wife want to do–get a couple of bikes to ride around, save on gas. I love exercise.”

At one point he must have exercised a fair amount, although I probably wouldn’t have noticed his large, ex-military muscles if it wouldn’t have been for the neighborhood teenage kids (mainly another neighbor’s daughter) out front one day, begging him, “Make a muscle. Make a muscle!” Buddy used to be a fireman, too, as he reminded me several times after a fire truck arrived to scope out a downed tree that was resting on the cable TV wires. He also called his friends at his former fire department to find out what was going on after a house less than a quarter of a mile from us blew up. (That neighbor was going through a messy divorce, we read in the papers, and has since served jail time.)

Buddy is a conversationalist difficult to walk away from. That is, difficult to politely walk away from, because he’ll keep talking to you from his porch even after you’ve unlocked your front door, paused a considerate amount of time to nod and smile, and gone inside. One morning I looked out the window to see a neighbor boy leaving on his walk to school. Buddy had him by the verbal collar and was streaming endless conversation at him. I was inside, behind glass, and I watched, trying to scream a mental text message to the boy: “Just walk away! Just walk away! You’ll never get away unless you just walk away!”

Some of Buddy’s conversations have required utmost calm in my soul. One day, just as I arrived home, I saw a fight between two white guys in their late teens just outside a house across the street. Buddy and another neighbor were in our driveway watching the fists fly; I think they were rather enjoying themselves.

“I’m going to go stop that fight,” I said, and headed off across the street. When I got there, I talked to the two guys and they stopped fighting, and then left. I noticed somewhere in the process that Buddy and the neighbor had followed me over, probably to make sure I wouldn’t get killed. Up the street were several younger boys, both white and black, who’d been watching the proceedings and laughing.

“Did you see that?” Buddy said as we walked back across the street. “I’m not prejudiced or anything, but those black boys think it’s funny when white people beat each other up.”

Another day the mail was four hours late. Buddy came over and knocked on our door. “Have you gotten your mail yet? I have bills out there that have to go today, and the mail hasn’t come yet. I’m going to call the post office.”

A few minutes later, he came back over. “They said that there’s a new person on the job, and she got confused, and she’s still on the route. That’s aggravating–I’ve got bills out there that will be late if they don’t go today. This is terrible. You’d think they’d know how to do their job.”

I politely said something like, “Yes, having a new job can be tough. Have you ever been new at a job?” He didn’t catch my drift, but that was probably OK, since the mail came just then. We walked out to check our mailboxes together.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t know what America is coming to. Things like this shouldn’t happen. It’s all because of the homosexuals, all the gays. America is in trouble. I can’t understand it.”

All of that said, though, Buddy is a helpful neighbor. He’s volunteered to babysit N (“Buddy just loves little kids,” said his wife), and occasionally he mows our front lawn (for a while we simply stopped mowing, since our mower doesn’t work well and we figured Buddy’d catch up our slack). Just now I heard the scraping of ice, so I looked out. Buddy is there, cleaning up his walkway, and spraying his iced-over windshield, it looks like with some kind of aerosol defroster. He’s wearing pajama pants and a brown jacket.

Maybe his wife’s about to leave for work.