Neighborhood Battles

When I was very small, our next door neighbors were too elderly sisters. One was a nice odl lady who offered us staled cookies and overly brown bananas and the other was a slightly crazy drunk who wandered the yard muttering to herself most days. My sister and I longed for kids to move in so we could have crazy adventures like the kids in books.

There were two other houses on the block that had children. One was a large white mansion belonging to one of the wealthiest families in town. They had seven children (three boys and four girls). The three boys were the perfect age to want to bully any little girl remotely close in age to their sisters. The two oldest girls would, over the years, serve as our babysitters. The two younger girls were our age, but with five older siblings, not in need of friends to get into trouble with. The other house was a multi-family home that appeared to house five branches of a single family. The oldest child was our age, the others were toddlers.

The biggest problem with all of these other children was a simple one of territory. My sisters and I attended the local public elementary school. The other kids went to the Catholic grade school. We instantly had nothing in common.

With this background, you can imagine out excitement when, following the not-too-surprising death of the drunken sister, the house next door was vacated and the elderly sisters were replaced by a family. Jenny was one year my senior and Mark was two years my junior. We thought we'd struck gold.

Monday morning as we all set out for school, our newfound glee was cut short. We emerged from the house in jeans and sweatshirts. Mark and Jenny emerged in the green plaid of the Catholic school.

I would be lying if I said we never were friends with them. But once we knew our differences, all hopes of storybook neighbors were lost. We played together, but we fought often. the fights were always over silly things, things that all came back to the public vs. Catholic school battle. We fought over the fact that we didn't want to hide their Easter eggs and then hunt for them. We fought over our pesky facts getting in the way of the wrong information the nuns would give them about sex. We fought over whether or not the leaf Mark was holding was poison ivy. We fought over the fact that we were pretty sure we had nothing to do with the death of Jesus.

Years later, their mother had another baby (then another and another and another) and the family moved to a bigger house in a newer area. With all those little brothers, it was no surprise that Jenny ended up in the public high school. We got along fine then, but Jenny hung out with the cool kids and I was a band nerd.