Notes on loving your neighbor

Love thy neighbor as thyself . . . Aw, it’s easy to love Mr. C., as he’s the guy who cheerfully lends his tools to everyone on the street and gives away hatfuls of fresh redolent summer-savory tomatoes. He’s the kind of guy who has an extra set of tire chains in his garage for when you suddenly have to drive over the mountain to retrieve a sick kid from college, and he says ah keep ’em until spring, son—it’s not like I need them. It’s easy to love that guy.

It’s not as easy to love Mrs. M., who is a ferocious bitter snide supercilious gossip and loves to intimate darkly that easy drugs and easier sex are rife among the teenagers in the neighborhood. But it can be done, if you just smile and grind your teeth, and consider that at least she is not heavily armed, or the governor, or in charge of the national Twitter feed.

And it’s just stone-cold not easy to love the guy down the street who parks all his huge vehicles in front of everyone else’s house and was caught once dumping motor oil in the creek, and who more than once has spent the night passed out cold in the moonscape of his garden. But you endure him, you say hey when you pass him in the street, and you talk a little sports, on the general theory that any flash of humanity might cool him out and maybe make him stop parking his Starfleet in front of tiny Mrs. H.’s cottage.