I am in the process of leaving a season of my life. In just over a month we will have moved out of our apartment and said good-bye to the few remaining neighborhood kids. Unless God changes our plans, we will be moving to a place with no kids near enough to visit.
I plan to give this chapter a proper send off by writing my thoughts on leaving for you, but for now I would like to share one of my favorite posts about these kids. I laugh everytime I remember their faces that day.
The reason our place is the neighborhood kid hang out place, I believe, is because ours is the only household in the area with a parent available at all times. (Special thanks to Eric for making that possible. Seriously.) Kids need a grown up ever ready to intervene and even they know that.
Most of these kids leave their bikes in front of our apartment, which wouldn’t be a problem except that they don’t line the bikes up properly in the bike rack and we wind up with two to three parking spots taken up by bikes.
This is a bother to other tenants, obviously, and they complain, obviously. I am the only responsible adult commonly witnessed giving all these kids marching orders and the notices about the errant bikes wind up slipped between my door and frame.
Our apartment’s assistant manager is a mousy, frustrated, anxious little woman (To be fair,I’m sure her mother would describe her as “smiley and precious”).
She tiptoes up the stairs, fearful I might hear her (not a reader of my blog, she doesn’t know I have the hearing of a hawk). With the finesse of a ninja – or something, she gently – so gently – slides her white legal envelope through, just above the door knob and dead bolt. Then she quickly, but oh so quietly, trots down the stairs and into her waiting golf cart. Her faces scrunches into a wince at the high pitched squeal of the back up alarm and her eyes dart up the stairs, worried that she has alerted me to her covert operation.
Twice now I have let her have her anonymity. I have graciously watched her do her thing without opening my door wide and scaring her to bits. Twice. I think that puts me in the “giver” category.
Now, I can only give so much. I am, after all, just one person.
A few days ago I left the front door open to enjoy fresh air and cool breezes (the two week Spring of Texas lore). I’m in the kitchen when I hear the unmistakable sound of her one inch heels clacking on my stairs. I know it’s her. I can almost smell her terror at the sight of the open door. I take a moment to consider what to do. Do I let her toss it through the doorway and run? Or do I go ahead and do the awkward verbal tango that I know will come of an attempt to argue the charges?
Drying my hands on my apron, I waltz to the door and decide that it’s time to tango. I wear an apron. And sometimes I waltz, and or tango, in my apron.
“Is this about the bikes again?” I ask as she hands me the note. I can see the paper shaking slightly in her hand as she gathers her thoughts and dabs at a bead of sweat on her upper lip.
“Umm, yeah. It seems as though some of the neighbors are complaining about all your bikes,” she punctuates her charge by adjusting her thick rimmed glasses and scrunching her nose a bit.
“Actually, you’re preaching to the choir on this one,” I say, trying to loosen her up and convey that we are a team, me and the mousy apartment manager, “We only have the one bike and the two scooters,” I continue, gesturing at the one scooter parked on the rack and Ian on his bike while Kenzie scooted past our sight, “and to the best of my knowledge, they are always either being used or put away on the bike rack.”
“Well, the complaints are about more than one bike. These kids really need to put their bikes away.”
“I agree. And the kids that I am responsible for do put their bikes away. These other nine bikes do not, in fact, belong to me”
“See, the problem is,” she scrunches her nose and readjusts her glasses, “people have to park here and when there are bikes every where, people can’t park here.”
I have a million snarky replies barking at the end of their leash on this one, but I ignore the barks and behave as best I can.
“Tell me about it, just last night I had to move two bikes to get to a spot. These kids are ridiculous. Maybe it would help if their parents got notices as well?”
“Yeeeah, you have to understand that the problem here is that the bikes do not get placed in the bike racks like they should. I’m going to have to ask you to make sure that all of your bikes are put away properly,” she says as she tugs at the bottom of her smart little suit jacket for authoritative emphasis.
Just how special does this lady think I am? Does she really think I am mother to this veritable patchwork quilt of about ten children? She can’t have misunderstood when I told her which children were mine. Has she just decided that I’ve collected all these kids in one tiny apartment like I’m some sort of Angelina Jolie on a really tight budget?
As I am making a movement to turn to go in, Jay Jay pulls up on his bike and drops it right in a parking spot. He actually looks both of us in the eye and walks away.
“See that little boy? You really need to tell him to put that bike up,” she admonishes me.
Admonishes me. Me! Admonished!
“I’ll tell him, but perhaps you’ve noticed that Jay Jay is not my kid.”
“Yes, but someone really needs to tell him what to do with his bike,” she says.
barking, barking, barking. The meter is running on my emotional energy and this lady has no clue how loose my grip is becoming on that leash.
“Hey, Jay Jay! How you gonna just pull up here and leave your bike right there? Put it up. I’m not about to be getting any more notices about your bike,” I tell him, and simultaneously admonish her.
He puts his bike away and she thanks me for my crowd control efforts but, “What are we going to do about all these other bikes?”
“I don’t know what we are going to do. I’ll keep getting on these kids about it, but I really think you’ll have to, I don’t know, put notices on their doors or something. Maybe somehow convey to their parents that they need to take care of their bikes,” I turn to go in and she tries one last time to get me to understand the root of the problem.
“It’s just not fair to people who have cars. This is where cars park and all these kids can’t be leaving their bikes in the parking spaces.”
“I hear you. I really do. These bikes are a problem. Can you believe this weather?”
She heaves a sigh and realizes that she hasn’t gotten through to me about all the bikes being in the way, agrees with me about the stunning weather, hops in her golf cart and putters off to do anything but put notices on the doors of the bike owners.
The second part of this story is about how I actually fixed the problem by really and truly throwing away one of the kid’s bikes. Put the fear of old lady Peterson in them, I did.
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