Captain Pike's Ship Log II

This guy moved here from New Hampshire. I guess he was up here once and liked it a lot so he moved his family up here. Bought a house diagonally across the street. Took a job from a local electrical supply company. We made fun of his accent. I nurtured a mild disdain for the fellow because I had seen this pattern before: sell your mediocre house down "there", put a couple hundred thousand dollars in your pocket, and buy a place up here. It's all great until you consider the young guy starting out who is already from here -- he can't afford to buy a decent place for his new wife and child. I guess I was particularly pissed off at this guy because... it reminded me of what I had done myself!

My wife was walking by one day. So this guy yells out "yo lady, you lose your dog?" Well she had, indeed, lost her dog, but, what was this "yo lady" bit? I guess the guy's kids had lured our little Pomeranian astray with promises of under the chin scratchings and the like. Well, anyone who was ever owned a dog like this knows that they only come running if you are made out of cheese and hotdogs Anyway, it was around then that we began calling him "yo lady". Yo lady's getting an early start on the weekend, we'd say, for example when the music started getting louder along with the voices emanating from the garage. We'd see him with his shorts on brandishing a Coors light, pointing at the upstairs dormers, a cigarette wagging out his every indicative. Yo lady seemed to have all the toys, too. At least two four wheelers and a dirt bike, along with a couple of snowmobiles -- he kept the dead-end road we lived on busy enough for four out-of-towners! I would never have admitted I was jealous of this guy driving by on his four wheeler with two kids onboard without one helmet among them, and apparently, no exhaust at all.

He was the kind of guy, you never see, or hear until the weekend. He'd have all kinds of interest in talking to you once he'd had a few beers; whether you wanted to or not. It was always something. One weekend, he had apparently set aside the time to saw up this winter's wood. I guess he wanted to get an early start. I woke up that Saturday morning to the sound of a dull chainsaw, burning its way through a wet log. I looked out, "good God, he must have six cord for us to endure!"

Many times I have seen two or three New Hampshire or Massachusetts registered vehicles in his property visiting for the long weekend. They would hoot and holler into the night and be the first ones up at daylight for the dump run. I guess I more or less excepted this fellow, whatever his name was, as a co-habitant of this run-of-the-mill, backwoods, backwater town. A couple of times walking by this spring, I figured he was playing a little tit-for-tat and imposing with his family down in New Hampshire somewhere, leaving us simple folk a little peace and quiet for a weekend. He always kept his place fairly neat during the week, all his toys stored, somehow, in his tiny garage.

It wasn't until I fell into one of the gossip circles, right in front of his place, that I found out he had been out of work since just before Christmas last winter. Somehow all the bad stuff I said and thought about this guy seemed to be pointed "right back at me".

"Well surely he'll...",

"Nope, looked all over, couldn't find a thing.", interrupted the chairman of the gossip committee. "Yeah, well at least his three kids didn't have to return to school after Christmas break".

I looked away suddenly as one single tear plopped, completely inappropriately, down my cheek, and bounced off my arm. I hadn't even noticed he was gone! I couldn't believe how callous I had been. The best I could do was wonder what kind of a guy this was that I had hated so much.