McSweeney's Issue 39 [antikvár]

DEAR McSWEENEY'S, I promised I'd be in touch soon after my last letter, but the year blinked past, time evaporated, and so I apologize that "soon" evidently means "more than a year." We're moving, that's one thing. Figuring that out has been taking a lot of time. Believe me, too, it brings out the neighbors, who now pay us all kinds of attention and offer loads of advice about what we should be doing. The driveway needs more gravel, the front railing could use another coat, things like that. We should weed the lawn better. I'm told. Since my last note, our one neighbor (the trampoline house) lost her battle with cancer. She passed away. We actually didn't even know; we were so used to ambulance sounds that it didn't occur to us for a while that the last visit was just that, the last visit. I was getting the mail when I saw Billy's car drive by with rest in peace and birth and death dates soaped onto the back window. Half the time I beam with pride at how much I pay attention; that's the key, right? You just have to pay attention to others, acknowledge the luimanity of those around you, and society will prosper. So okay, but the other half of the time is this embarrassing ignorance of the world and everyone in it. If pressed, I have to admit I spend a lot more time there on that other half than a healthy self-image can allow. Not to mention that when your neighbors use the attention you do give them to dole out unsolicited advice it makes you question the whole equation. But the neighbor catty-corner to our backyard? I finally saw him. For the first time in five years I saw him. How's that. They're making a big deal right now out of how the people in Abbottabad didn't know who was living in that high-walled compound, but even though there are any number of questions I might pose to Pakistan, that wouldn't be one of them. I have no idea what the guy across the way has been doing for the last five years, sixty feet from my kids' swing-set. I mean, I can't tell if this is his summer home, if he has family, if he has one car or two, if that wire-fenced garden that's somehow growing something is maybe secretly tended to in the middle of the night. Not long after I spotted him, maybe the next week, my wife, C—, was looking out our back kitchen window trying to get a peek at him herself.