Dec
9
I know this is the time for “peace on Earth” and “love thy neighbor” and “fa la laa” and all that. But did you ever know someone, just by virtue of their very existence, annoys the crap out of you? The human equivalent to nails on a blackboard?
(And for those of you who are thinking of ME right now, you can just STOP. RIGHT. THERE. You KNOW I am a good person, despite my appallng fashion sense. And I am a delightful dancer, and make good pie. So stop it.)
NO. I meant The Mayor.
You remember The Mayor. He’s not really the mayor, obviously. He’s the annoying neighbour who has to pry into everyone’s business, like a young, balding Mrs. Kravitz. He’s the one who shouts appallingly none-of-his-business questions and comments at you, in the name of “humour”, like “Why aren’t you working anymore?” when you’ve been laid off. The one who comments on the state of your home, your yard, your garden, and if he doesn’t like it, will do things like sneak over and dig your weeds when you’re away. The one who makes passive aggressive digs at you as a way of being “neighbourly”.
We despise The Mayor.
So today, a lazy cold Saturday, BDH and I decided to eat a lunch of junk food (we had pigs in a blanket — for the uninitiated, it’s weiners wrapped in those prepackaged crescent rolls, that you bake in the oven) and sit down and enjoy a few episodes of The Vicar of Dibley. Just have a lazy Saturday. After our glut of bad food and good comedy, we both felt a little nappish. BDH has been sick for weeks with a chest cold, so he went off to snooze in the back bedroom. I decided to take a shower, and then I went into the front bedroom and pulled up the duvet for a long winter’s nap.
I had been there for maybe half an hour and I heard it. SCRAPE. SCRAPE. SCRAAAAAAAAAAPE. SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAPE.
I rolled over and hoped it would go away. It did not.
I got up and went to the window. Out there, 3 days after the snowfall, was The Mayor, scraping the snow off his driveway. It’s not like we had gotten tons of snow anyway. And he’d driven in and out about a billion times since it snowed, so he’d packed all the snow down already. The weather tomorrow and for the next four days calls for warm temperatures and rain, which will melt all the snow anyway. And yet, like some sort of annoying insect that troubles you only when you’re sleeping, or (more likely) a man with some sort of “bug the neighbours” telepathy, there he was. SCRAPE. SCRAAAAPE.
I hated him.
I stared imaginary daggers at him for a few moments, and then shut my curtains with an angry flounce. He looked up. And then he got on with his stupid shovelling.
I could not get back to sleep with the annoying noise, so I got up and went downstairs for a big glass of water. As I went back upstairs, I looked outside. The Mayor was no longer out there. His driveway was abandoned, half cleared.
Did he think, “AHA! She cannot nap! Mission accomplished!” and head inside? Did he feel the heat of my stare and feel slightly remorseful and go inside? Did the thought that told him he needed to shovel his drive suddenly just die of loneliness, and he wandered off? It’s hard to say.
One thing is for sure, he roused me from a decent nap, and left me feeling peevish and definitely not in the Christmas spirit. Definitely Grinchy. I am going to have to sit down this evening and watch Holiday Inn to set the balance right again. And possibly The Bells of St. Mary’s or Going My Way. I don’t mind pulling out the heavy holiday artillery. I don’t think there’s any call for White Christmas yet, but if there is, I’ll be ready.
[...] I was out for about an hour yesterday, wailing away on this stuff, hacking and beating and shovelling. And who, do you think, comes out onto his porch at minute 57 of all my work? That’s right, THE MAYOR. Now, you just KNOW that he’s been watching me for awhile. It’s what he does. But does he come out, shovel in hand, and offer to help me? Oh no. He comes out in his sock feet onto his porch and holler, “Hey, do you want to use my ICEBREAKER??” (Say “icebreaker” to yourself from here on in the story in the same deep, feedback-filled announcer voice as you’d say “MONSTER TRUCK RALLY” and ‘SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!” and you’ll get the effect this had in my mind.) I politely declined, saying I was getting through it just fine, and then The Mayor proceeded to tell me, using ICEBREAKER repeatedly in his exhortations, how THE ICEBREAKER would just “rip through all that stuff” etc. Again, I politely declined. My wrist was really starting to hurt at this point, and I could not lift much more anyway, so I said I was just about done. He left with a “Well, alright…” in that lingering voice that indicates that a) I was a FOOL for not using the ICEBREAKER, and 2) I hadn’t NEARLY finished shovelling the driveway and therefore was a bad homeowner and he’d have to tell the Good Homeowners’ Association (read: his wife) about how, once again, we were half-assed in our homeowner duties. And I packed away my shovels and went inside, wrist hurting badly enough that I briefly considered heading to emergency. [...]