You’re Taking the Zucchinis Either Way

Neighbors were serious business during my formative years. Until I left for college I knew every family in our housing edition; in fact everybody even knew everyone else’s dog’s name. Overall we probably gossiped more about resident canine mischief than we did about the neighborhood alcoholics. That’s how well interconnected we were when I was a young lad.

If illness or some other miscellaneous tragedy befell a household, the neighborhood moms converged to deliver pre-made dinners to the stricken family for a few days in order to lighten their load.

The neighborhood dads, equally eager to help but largely oblivious as to how to contribute in any meaningful way, would wander by and offer to let the afflicted father borrow their tool sets.

Giving permission for a man to borrow your 7-1/4" High-Torque Framing Dewalt Circular Saw with Twist Lock Cordset is tantamount to offering a spare kidney.

This was purely a gesture– very few situations in which your mother-in-law gets hit by a train or your daughter contracts mad-cow disease require the use of an electric drill gun. But the elder males of my childhood hail from a generation largely suspicious of emotional exhibitionism when unrelated to organized sports. For the most part they rely on cordless belt sanders and discussing World War II movies to fill this deficiency.

Each summer my family invited the whole neighborhood over for a weenie roast, replete with probably carcinogenic anti-mosquito candles, mismatched lawn furniture and a potluck smorgasbord. Dad would also ceremoniously light ablaze the gigantic funeral pyre of dead tree limbs and scrap lumber in the back acre accumulated over the preceding year, which teetered and discharged belches of fire at a height sufficient to give several Norse chieftains a proper Valhalla sendoff.

Retrospectively I think most of our neighbors probably attended our social functions primarily to keep an eye on Dad’s bonfire. He always kept a garden hose handy and calculated prevailing winds ahead of time before igniting a conflagration which astronauts could presumably view from space, but there were always at least two or three pot-bellied guys in baseball caps standing nearby as an advanced warning system, should we inadvertently trigger a suburban inferno.

The red dot is Dad's bonfire.

Furthermore, we were very pro-active neighbors. Dad issued a sporadic, unsolicited neighborhood newspaper called The Clarion Bugle which according to him was very popular. We also doled out zucchinis with boundless generosity.

This munificence came about largely because no one in our family particularly likes zucchinis, yet they remain an ongoing staple of Dad’s vegetable garden. It’s easier to cultivate zucchinis than tomatoes, and they tend to grow very large, which affords a disproportionate sense of accomplishment. I don’t know this for a fact, but based on my understanding of the current Omnibus Farm Bill, it’s entirely possible that the federal government has been subsidizing Dad’s unwanted zucchinis for years. That may very well be where my college tuition money came from.

So every summer after Dad hauled in another wheel barrel brimming with zucchinis and a sense of profound agricultural achievement, Mom would sift through tomes of cookbooks to figure out how to prepare them in some novel way which might render the stuff palatable. When the balance between Mom’s culinary creativity and Dad’s impressive ability to harvest water melon-sized zucchinis finally grew disproportionate, Dad would magnanimously troop around our neighborhood distributing his crop amongst the locals. Who in turn received the produce with friendly and gracious attitudes, and pretend to be thrilled at the prospects of obtaining a free mutant cucumber. The first time.

The second time Dad swung by with an armload of half-edible gourds, they would reluctantly accept our surplus squash, but with far less aplomb. Finally, well after Dad’s vegetable garden yielded enough oblonged vegetables to blot out famine in Africa, we would force the zucchinis on our uninterested neighbors without their consent.

I can recall one instance in which Dad solicited my help to carry zucchinis over to the Sheetz’s front porch, which we dropped on their door mat like a pile of orphan babies before ringing the doorbell and scrambling back to our house.

The Sheetz’s are gone now, incidentally. I’m fairly confident they’re not dead; I think they moved away or something. Most of the neighbors I grew up with have. New families I do not know have scuttled in like hermit crabs to vacated shells. I have no idea what the names of their dogs are. Apparently there’s an entirely new breed called a “Labradoodle,” which I don’t think existed before I hit puberty.

That may sound a little sad, but it’s just how life works, isn’t it? Stuff changes. Neighbors relocate. Zucchinis prevail. If I could visit more frequently I would probably know the new folks, as I assume my parents do.

What does unnerve me is that now, in my high twenties, I have only met two people who live on the floor of my apartment complex. And I can’t remember their names, either. Washington DC is a different world than my childhood home, where even now during the summer I can still hear coyotes howling on the horizon when visiting to help Dad tend his abhorrent zucchini crop. Yet I can’t help but feel some kind of intrinsic failure on my part in that my life has swapped co-tenants for neighbors.

Someday, I would like to go back to being a proper neighbor. I would even like my own garden, and to cultivate plants and award them to neighbors with dogs I know the names of.

Not zucchinis, though.

Probably opium poppies. I hear opium poppies sell better than zucchinis.

Photo Credits: “Neighbourhood Watch” CC lydiashiningbrightly; “DW364” by Dewalt; “Bonfire” CC Kenneth Johnson C.; “The Earth from Space” by NightEarth.com; Graph made via GraphJam.com; “4 Huge Zucchini” CC Stephanie Richard; “Doorbell” CC Terry Ross; “Poppy Field in Doncaster” CC Doug Belshaw