New people at the block club meeting

Martha came to the block club meetings, as did the young black couple from the corner. They had jobs in the insurance industry and the white neighbors counted them as a real boon to the neighborhood. The new retired couple on the corner came too, eager to tell how they’d moved in from the suburbs because they preferred city life. But the second meeting the man, Mac, said the people in the suburbs were snobs because they had too many rules about the weeds and dogs and they didn’t know how to have fun and didn’t like his disabled son’s beer parties.

Martha stood up and shouted, “We got those rules here, too!” Mac stopped speaking abruptly and scowled at her. She went on. “I got kids going to school and I am a homeowner! It’s a miracle I even got this house and I am going to be here a long, long time and I am going to live in a quiet neighborhood!”

Mac took offense at this, somehow, although the rest of us supported Martha. The meeting disbanded awkwardly. Martha walked out with the black couple. They talked animatedly on the sidewalk, then she turned and went to her own house, they went in the other direction to theirs.

Over the summer, Mac stopped talking to his neighbors, fenced in his yard and got two Dobermans who barked a lot. His son had beer parties, but as they were on weekends and we were used to drug parties on weeknights, no one much minded the beer parties.

However, Ron complained Mac didn’t clean up the dog shit and Mac said he’d read the regulations and the city said he didn’t have to hose it down anymore than once a week and that was what he was doing.

“Call the police on me,” he dared Ron. “They can’t do a thing, I’m obeying the law.”

“But what about the neighbors,” Ron said to me after he’d told me this story.

“Yeah, what about the neighbors.” The real problem in the neighborhood, I realized, wasn’t poverty or joblessness or lower income or race but too many people who only respected the authority of a gun.