Think back to your neighbors you’ve had throughout your life.  Did they help to shape your life in some way?  This little blog post is dedicated to those neighbors that helped to shape my life.

When I was five (and a half), my family moved from one of the worst parts of downtown Atlanta to a then rural suburban community.  Next to the train tracks down the road, there was a nice little horse farm that let you go for rides.  Although we weren’t allowed to go because the owners smoked too much pot, the idea that people even had horses anywhere nearby excited this horse-loving little girl.

Our neighborhood was filled with nice kids for me to play with and lots of girls for my older brother to beat up.  Sure, our next door neighbor Kimberly might have put the fear of God into me when she told me that there was a known murderer living in the neighborhood who only murdered people living in our house.  This murder’s name was Joe and he’d killed a train engineer  as a teenager.  He did about 10 years of jail time.  She happened to leave out the part about the death being an accidental.  Details. That was the first lesson she taught me: skepticism is a good thing.

Kimberly also taught me the importance of “hocking a loogey” with as much of a prelude as possible. “It’s all in the rumbling sound you make with your sinuses,” she said as she demonstrated.  It turned out that I was a natural.  Having constant sinus drainage, I outdid the master at her own game and learned later to use it against boy’s with weak stomachs.

Within a year, they moved and we had our introduction to our new next door neighbors when we noticed their little yippie dog barking at us.  Being children with little to no social graces, we teased the dog by barking back over the large wooden privacy fence.  The dog went crazy, bouncing up and down like a hamster on crack.  That’s when we heard the ever memorable voice of our neighbor Eva Ostrovsky.  To imagine her voice, think of Julia Child’s with a pronounced eastern European accent.

“Aww, poor Tim-ah-tee (Timothy),” she began. “You should not tease, my poor Timothy, that is not nice.”  We all stood dead still, not being able to see her and only hearing the man voice doing an impression of a woman.  Finally, we peeked over to see that it was indeed a woman.  We had a long and notable relationship with Ms. Eva and her husband Irving “who’s cool as a cucumber,” Mom would always interject.  We thought it funny how Ms. Eva doted on her beloved Timothy and decrepit cat Shiva so much.  We had an almost identical cat that beat Shiva up all of the time.

Throughout the spring and summer, Ms. Eva blasted opera to her plants (to make them grow–she said).  She seemed to have an abundantly green thumb and it showed in her fairy-land flower garden.  Ms. Eva’s love for her garden taught me that beautiful things take love and care and sometimes, a little Puccini to grow.  However, she held a particular hatred for the “hairy bush” that grew on our property line.  Each year, she hacked away out our favorite bush and twice, in the process of burning and digging it up, she hacked through our phones lines. She grew tall privacy bushes between our properties so that she wouldn’t have to look at our Sanford and Sons backyard.  And although most of these things crack me up to think of, she did one very kind thing for me.  She once told me, “Always keep singing because you sing like an angel and I know it makes God smile.  It makes my heart glad too.”

On the other side of us, we had neighbors Hugo III and his son Hugo IV.  Hugo Jr . Jr. Jr. was learning to play the drums. As the years progressed, it became clear that all along, he had been playing the “George of the Jungle” theme song.  I always enjoyed his summer practice because it coincided with my tilling up and tending our somewhat large vegetable garden (that eventually grew extinct thanks to those tall privacy bushes of Ms. Eva’s).

A few years ago, my Mom called to regale me with a long story about how my youngest brother and a neighbor kid accidentally almost burned down our entire neighborhood.  Okay, not the entire neighborhood, just ours and the Hugo’s, Ostrovksy’s, and the other neighbors I won’t mention here.  It started off a rather typical story.  There was a little fire that my youngest brother and a little neighbor kid started in our backyard when they found a lighter.  My brother grabbed the dog’s water bowl and tried to put it out.  Unfortunately, at the time, there was a rather severe drought in Georgia, and everything was highly flammable.  So, seeing that the dog bowl didn’t work as expected, Mom was called in to save the day.  Mom sprayed it down with the hose for an hour until there was barely any sign of smoke.  Whew!  That was a close one.  Story over.

That would be rather anti-climactic, wouldn’t it?

At 3 AM, Hugo III, whose fence and tall trees were currently burning to a crisp, awoke from the smell of smoke and a very bright light.  He looked out to find that both our backyards were ablaze.  He called the fire department, and tried to wake my parents up (calling, banging on the doors, etc…).  Dad awoke, thinking that he heard a fire truck, looked out of the wrong window, and not seeing anything, went back to bed.  In the morning, everyone awoke to find that our backyard no longer had trees, nor a rotting privacy fence.  They also found that the front half of our Previa was melted like the Nazi guy’s face in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.  My brother Philip still drives the melted van and probably will until the old thing gives up the ghost.

And that is how Hugo III saved my family.  Lesson learned?  Never play with fire in a drought!

What are your neighbor stories?

My youngest three brothers are currently at that age of trying to figure out how the whole girl thing works.  A few times, they’ve asked my advice, and although I have a few things to say (perhaps not all helpful), I try my best.  However, I would like to preface this by saying that the only guy I ever dated was Ethan (my husband) so I don’t have a whole lot of experience except for saying “I just want to be friends” more times than I’d like to admit.  That being said, here are a few things that I’ve noticed along the way.

Advice to guys (and girls):

1. If the girl has a chinchilla that has lived for more than 2 years, she’s most likely high maintenance and best to avoid.
2. If all of the girl’s favorite TV shows are reality TV shows, she’ll be fun for cheap dates, but don’t think of her for a long-term relationship.
3. If you want a girl to be honest with you, be honest with her first.
4. Always be yourself.

Advice to girls (and guys):

1. Never become the knight-in-shining-armor for a guy.

Growing up, I made the mistake of standing up to bullies who were beating up boys.  Growing up with brothers, I had loads of fighting experience and on several occasions, I put this knowledge to good use. Seeing one of my brothers getting bullied, I would grab the bully by the front of the collar, pin him against the wall and threaten him until he looked genuinely frightened.  This worked like a charm.  Yeah, not very feminine, I know.

What I learned though, was that it’s one thing to defend your brother, it’s a whole different ball of wax to defend a boy you don’t know.  I made this mistake twice: once in 3rd grade and once in 5th.  Each time, the boy was saved from being pulverized and a reversed knight-in-shining-armor infatuation ensued.  One gave me an engagement ring after knowing me for a month (very sweet) and one wrote long, eloquent love letters for over a year.  One became my friend, the other did not accept kindly my lack of reciprocation.

2. Never become the damsel in distress (unless you want a caregiver relationship)

I learned early on that if a guy seemed remotely interested in me, he had to pass my litmus test: honesty about my life.  This always elicited one of three possible responses: sympathy, understanding or complete avoidance.  Usually, people chose the third, but occasionally, some guys chose the first.  These guys liked to envision my honesty as a plea for them to save me. How can you explain that you don’t want or need to be saved? I didn’t want sympathy, I just wanted understanding.  Ethan passed with flying colors 🙂

3. Never date a guy just because you feel sorry for him.

Fortunately, I’ve not had this experience, but I know too many unhappy people that have.  Many of them got married and had tumultuous marriages because the reason they felt sorry for the guy was the same thing that later drove them crazy. That leads to my next point.

4.  If there’s something that drives you crazy about him while you’re dating him, don’t think that you’re going to change him.  Accept him for who he is, or if you can’t deal, end it.

5. Never settle because you don’t think you deserve better.

What are your thoughts?  Anything to add to the list?

(Me at 15)

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Most people get the love your neighbor part, but why is it so hard to understand the “as yourself”  part? Because we don’t know how to love ourselves.  As Christians, many times we have a warped view of loving our neighbors more than ourselves.  We beat ourselves up and always try to put others first, but is that really what is being said here?  I’m not saying you should love yourself in the Jenny Craig commercial stand-in-front-of-a-mirror-in-your-newly-fitting-little-black-dress-and-love-the-new-you way.  I’m also not talking about a narcissistic kind of love either. I’m talking about loving ourselves for who God made us: the good, the bad, the seen and unseen, lovable and unlovable people that we think we are.  We have this idea of trading God one good deed for an ounce of his love.  We see His command more like this: “Love your neighbors and if you do, I’ll love you more.” We think that we don’t deserve love: not God’s nor anyone else’s.  And that would be right.  We don’t deserve anything, but God’s already offered to give us his love for free and all we have to do is get over ourselves and accept.  He’s like the old man at church who used to hand all of the kids mints after church.  We probably didn’t deserve them, but he always held them out for us as we passed by.  What keeps us from loving ourselves and in turn, keeps us from fully loving our neighbors? Let’s explore…

Loving your outward self

When I was 8 years old, I knew a girl named Catalina.  My brother Jonathan always called her “Catalina salad dressing” because I think maybe he had a slight crush on her.  She was 15, and was exactly what I wanted to be when I turned fifteen.  She was tall, well-endowed (a perfect hourglass figure), porcelain skinned, and had long black curly hair that flowed down gently to her waist.  I wanted to be her–except maybe have cute Meg Ryan “I.Q.” curls.  Little did I know that when I turned fifteen, my hair would not be able to hold a curl even with two cans of industrial grade hairspray, my chest would be “flat as a flitter” as my mom used to say, and I would have what is known as a “rectangular figure”  (see above photo). Basically, this is a nice way of saying that I had a boy figure and this was one of the factors that led to my being mistaken by many people as a lesbian.  As college progressed, I had the pleasure of being one of those lucky people categorized as a “sufferer of adult acne.”  The day before my wedding, my dad, trying to be helpful asked, “Don’t you think you should see someone about–you know, the pimples?  They look pretty bad.”  Haha, thanks Dad.

On the flip side of the coin, since high school, girls have always made comments like “I wish I had a body that looked like yours”  or other such sentiments.  This always makes me feel guilty and awkward.  I run and try to be healthy, but really it comes down to things much out of my control: genes, bone structure, etc…I don’t want anyone to compare themselves to me.

(And just a little furthering of my point, if you watched any of the olympics, you saw how people playing the exact same sports could have completely different body types while being completely in shape.)

Now to the nitty-gritty details of who we really are.

Loving your inward self 

Some years ago while I was in college, someone made this point that to love your neighbor, you must first love yourself.  “Do this,” he told me. “In a mirror, can you look yourself in the eye and tell yourself ‘I love you?’ ”  This seemed a little odd to me, but one night, alone in my dorm room, I stood in front of a mirror and tried; I could not do it. When I looked at myself, I saw someone who didn’t deserve love, someone that was not good enough, not smart enough, not outgoing enough.  I saw a person all too familiar with failure.  I saw only the tarnish.  That girl who seemed to have it all together on the outside was different from the one on the inside.  On the outside, I was the good student, the hard worker, the woman who pulled herself up by the bootstraps and didn’t need anyone.  And yet, just to love myself, I had to ask God to help me.  I had to see myself from God’s perspective: a person worth loving.  Perhaps this is how it’s supposed to work.

Since that time, whenever I find myself having difficulty loving my neighbor, I look a little deeper.  Most of the time, what is bothering me is the reflection I see of myself–the self I try to hide from others.  I encourage you to see yourself and others through God’s eyes. And although I’m still working at it myself and always will be, I just thought I would share some of my thoughts with you.