HERE. STEAL THIS.

Blog number 487******* 03 February 2011

My son wrote me and told me that he lives next to a couple in the same apartment complex. He said that "none of us like them," that no one talks to them or even looks at them. "Anti-social nasty people," as my son puts it.

He said they have four cars for two people. They park one car to block two spaces, so two cars block four spaces and then they get a little considerate and only use one car for each space. So, two people, four cars, six scarce spaces. Nice people.

When my son told me about this, it reminded me of neighbors we once had in my senior year of High School in Emmetsburg Iowa, a small farming community of ten thousand souls.

My mother, father, and four of us kids lived in a house on the outskirts of the town on an acre that was shared with another house in which lived a reclusive couple in their forties.

There was a battery lying in the field behind both the houses. It had been there for several weeks until one day I decided to pick it up and take it and sell it for fifty cents. Just as I leaned down and got my hands on it, the lady came out of her house and yelled at me, saying, "Leave that alone.  It's ours."

Now, I knew damn well that the battery wasn't hers. Somebody had simply left it there as junk. But my mother had already said something about being careful with those people, so I walked away and left the battery, saying nothing.

The weekly paper had, about this time, been publishing articles about a rash of thieves stealing from the farmers around there. One day I read in the paper about our anti-social neighbors being caught by a farmer and his daughter (who was in my grade) lying in wait with a shotgun as the thieves were driving down the lane coming out of the farmer's acreage.  The couple got out of their car before they reached the farmer and started throwing stolen coal out of the car. 

Warmed the cockles is what that article did. To be in the paper for the whole community to read and know about. Not only thieves, but pretty stupid as well. Way to go, idiots!