magic radio
May. 26th, 2008 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7My neighborhood is super-boring. (Except for the odd mistaken break-in, of course.) Little ranch houses, some with second-storey additions but many without; tiny square backyards, detached garages, white vinyl siding, fake brick facades. Everyone has either a white-painted chain link fence or an un-fancy wooden stockade fence. The houses all date from the early fifties, and are almost all built from the same plan. It's in a decent suburban school district, though not a great one. Decent property values, decently-maintained though old houses, not old enough to be architecturally significant but too old to be quite up to modern standards of size and convenience. (You need to climb steps to get into them, and the living rooms are too small for modern giant furniture. Walls are plaster but look like drywall. Electrical systems are a nightmare. Etcetera.)
The neighbors on either side are boring, with unexceptional landscaping. To the south there's a woman with the same first name as me; she's probably in her early forties, and is pleasant but not friendly, and has very precise and minimal gardening, with a few severely-manicured bushes and an annual installation of pink petunias and impatiens in tiny planters. The only excitement from that quarter is that the year we moved in, she and her husband had loud fights about his drinking, and eventually he disappeared. We later learned that he'd gone to jail for DWIs, and she'd divorced him. We only found that out because he used to date a cousin of Z's. (The city is that small, yes it is.) Now she's quiet, seldom home, and in three (four?) years, I've never seen her out in her yard except to mow it or weed it or maintain it. She doesn't sit outside ever. She comes out after dark to water it.
On the other side is Crazy Mrs. Bob, who has been a thorn in the side of this house's residents for probably forty years. I've mentioned her here before. Thankfully she hasn't spoken to us since Z told her she was full of shit and should fuck off two or three years ago now. Her husband waves to us when she's not looking. We feel bad; he's a nice guy. The neighbors on the other side assure us that he gives as good as he gets in their late-night shrill arguments. She's the kind of person who goes out and puts rubberbands around the foliage of her tulips once they have stopped blooming, because they look tidier that way. She also tore down the flowering morning glories I'd trained up the chain-link fence and snarled at me that they were "weeds", because they were wild-looking. Which was what I'd carefully trained them to be. But whatever.
The neighborhood is largely the same up and down the street, and the back fence faces onto a completely featureless yard with a solitary forsythia bush as its only foliage besides grass. Middle-class white people, mostly old. Boring. I don't fit in, and have let my backyard grow pretty wild just as an antidote to all the suburbia. I grew up, shoeless and often naked, on an unpaved road in a tumbledown old farmhouse shored up by perpetual remodeling/repair projects (it's nice now, because Dad finally finished most of them, but when I was a kid, the back room's floor was plywood, and I remember the cracked linoleum and the plexiglass windows). The house was surrounded by cornfields, and the gardens were little stone-bordered ovals of riotous color surrounded by fifty-year-old new-growth forest that had been neglected and let run wild for at least forty of those years. We'd walk from rafter to rafter in the barn because the floorboards had fallen in, and we spent whole days pretending to be lost in bramble mazes while we picked blackberries in our bathing suits. (Clever, that. Note to observers planning to replicate this: wear jeans. Or at least some damn shoes.)
So I don't fit in here, really. My aesthetic is off, all wrong, downright scandalous. I like things to be spilling out of pots, twining around other things, planted in odd numbers and growing in clumps. At least some things should go to seed and climb as high as the window. There shouldn't be any bare dirt showing. Stones should have moss on them, or failing that, should have weeds growing between them and half-hiding them. My parents have never owned a weed-whacker and I don't know what to do with one. Our lawns usually ended at an arbitrary line, giving way to thigh-height weeds; as a youthful mower of lawns I made a point of always letting that line creep back a little every time I mowed, so it wound up as a gradation instead of a sharply-defined line.
So this suburbia isn't really my scene.
But kitty-corner in the back, the back-fence neighbors of Mrs. Bob are an indeterminate family whose members I can't number or make out. They are black, and one fixture at least is an older man, most likely a grandfather, with a booming happy voice. I have never met him, but one day as I was getting into the car he saw me through the crack between the houses, and shouted, "Have a happy holiday!" (I think it was Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.) I wished him the same.
He has numerous kinfolks who either visit frequently or live with him. One young man set off some firecrackers after last 4th of July while I was gardening, and one came over their neighbor's garage and exploded in my tomato patch. I shrieked, not having expected this. There was a long pause, and then the young man appeared at the back fence, ashen-faced.
"Oh my God," he said, "I'm so sorry, it tipped over! Are you OK?"
I would have been furious had he not come to see, but he did, so I laughingly assured him all was fine, I'd just been startled.
There's also a young woman who either has a speech impediment or a heavy accent. She shouts for hours on end. It's possible she's just conversing out the upstairs window, I don't know. She never uses any consonants. I have never, in three or four years now, been able to make out a single word she says. Everyone else in the household speaks English.
Sometimes someone plays basketball. It's an endless thump, thump, thump, thump, occasionally interrupted by a clatter and swish. Often it's hours of noise, a single solitary person entertaining himself. (Herself? I've never seen the person, it's blocked by the back fence neighbor's garage.)
At any rate. I'm terribly fond of these neighbors, despite not knowing them. Because they enjoy their house, enjoy their yard, and in all their noise, never are arguing or fighting. They're just talking, just playing. Often there are small children, and they shriek and play.
And the old man sits outside every day that it's warm enough, and turns on his radio, and turns it all the way up. He plays a station that identifies itself as AM 1440 "Solid Gold Soul". I have looked for this station and have not been able to tune it in.
There are never commercials. There is never much talking. The DJs don't talk much if at all. They just play old R&B, and soul, and classics. Hours and hours and hours of it, every day.
I like to think it's a magic radio. My tiny green overgrown cube of a backyard, in my boring first-ring suburban neighborhood, is daily suffused with music older than I am, often overlaid with the old man's genial, booming conversation with some friend or relative or other. He's the type who probably knows his mailman's kids' names.
I have only the vaguest notion what the fellow looks like. Our yards are invisible to one another. I know he has a lilac bush; it's tall enough to stick over the garage roof a little.
Solid gold soul.
The neighbors on either side are boring, with unexceptional landscaping. To the south there's a woman with the same first name as me; she's probably in her early forties, and is pleasant but not friendly, and has very precise and minimal gardening, with a few severely-manicured bushes and an annual installation of pink petunias and impatiens in tiny planters. The only excitement from that quarter is that the year we moved in, she and her husband had loud fights about his drinking, and eventually he disappeared. We later learned that he'd gone to jail for DWIs, and she'd divorced him. We only found that out because he used to date a cousin of Z's. (The city is that small, yes it is.) Now she's quiet, seldom home, and in three (four?) years, I've never seen her out in her yard except to mow it or weed it or maintain it. She doesn't sit outside ever. She comes out after dark to water it.
On the other side is Crazy Mrs. Bob, who has been a thorn in the side of this house's residents for probably forty years. I've mentioned her here before. Thankfully she hasn't spoken to us since Z told her she was full of shit and should fuck off two or three years ago now. Her husband waves to us when she's not looking. We feel bad; he's a nice guy. The neighbors on the other side assure us that he gives as good as he gets in their late-night shrill arguments. She's the kind of person who goes out and puts rubberbands around the foliage of her tulips once they have stopped blooming, because they look tidier that way. She also tore down the flowering morning glories I'd trained up the chain-link fence and snarled at me that they were "weeds", because they were wild-looking. Which was what I'd carefully trained them to be. But whatever.
The neighborhood is largely the same up and down the street, and the back fence faces onto a completely featureless yard with a solitary forsythia bush as its only foliage besides grass. Middle-class white people, mostly old. Boring. I don't fit in, and have let my backyard grow pretty wild just as an antidote to all the suburbia. I grew up, shoeless and often naked, on an unpaved road in a tumbledown old farmhouse shored up by perpetual remodeling/repair projects (it's nice now, because Dad finally finished most of them, but when I was a kid, the back room's floor was plywood, and I remember the cracked linoleum and the plexiglass windows). The house was surrounded by cornfields, and the gardens were little stone-bordered ovals of riotous color surrounded by fifty-year-old new-growth forest that had been neglected and let run wild for at least forty of those years. We'd walk from rafter to rafter in the barn because the floorboards had fallen in, and we spent whole days pretending to be lost in bramble mazes while we picked blackberries in our bathing suits. (Clever, that. Note to observers planning to replicate this: wear jeans. Or at least some damn shoes.)
So I don't fit in here, really. My aesthetic is off, all wrong, downright scandalous. I like things to be spilling out of pots, twining around other things, planted in odd numbers and growing in clumps. At least some things should go to seed and climb as high as the window. There shouldn't be any bare dirt showing. Stones should have moss on them, or failing that, should have weeds growing between them and half-hiding them. My parents have never owned a weed-whacker and I don't know what to do with one. Our lawns usually ended at an arbitrary line, giving way to thigh-height weeds; as a youthful mower of lawns I made a point of always letting that line creep back a little every time I mowed, so it wound up as a gradation instead of a sharply-defined line.
So this suburbia isn't really my scene.
But kitty-corner in the back, the back-fence neighbors of Mrs. Bob are an indeterminate family whose members I can't number or make out. They are black, and one fixture at least is an older man, most likely a grandfather, with a booming happy voice. I have never met him, but one day as I was getting into the car he saw me through the crack between the houses, and shouted, "Have a happy holiday!" (I think it was Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.) I wished him the same.
He has numerous kinfolks who either visit frequently or live with him. One young man set off some firecrackers after last 4th of July while I was gardening, and one came over their neighbor's garage and exploded in my tomato patch. I shrieked, not having expected this. There was a long pause, and then the young man appeared at the back fence, ashen-faced.
"Oh my God," he said, "I'm so sorry, it tipped over! Are you OK?"
I would have been furious had he not come to see, but he did, so I laughingly assured him all was fine, I'd just been startled.
There's also a young woman who either has a speech impediment or a heavy accent. She shouts for hours on end. It's possible she's just conversing out the upstairs window, I don't know. She never uses any consonants. I have never, in three or four years now, been able to make out a single word she says. Everyone else in the household speaks English.
Sometimes someone plays basketball. It's an endless thump, thump, thump, thump, occasionally interrupted by a clatter and swish. Often it's hours of noise, a single solitary person entertaining himself. (Herself? I've never seen the person, it's blocked by the back fence neighbor's garage.)
At any rate. I'm terribly fond of these neighbors, despite not knowing them. Because they enjoy their house, enjoy their yard, and in all their noise, never are arguing or fighting. They're just talking, just playing. Often there are small children, and they shriek and play.
And the old man sits outside every day that it's warm enough, and turns on his radio, and turns it all the way up. He plays a station that identifies itself as AM 1440 "Solid Gold Soul". I have looked for this station and have not been able to tune it in.
There are never commercials. There is never much talking. The DJs don't talk much if at all. They just play old R&B, and soul, and classics. Hours and hours and hours of it, every day.
I like to think it's a magic radio. My tiny green overgrown cube of a backyard, in my boring first-ring suburban neighborhood, is daily suffused with music older than I am, often overlaid with the old man's genial, booming conversation with some friend or relative or other. He's the type who probably knows his mailman's kids' names.
I have only the vaguest notion what the fellow looks like. Our yards are invisible to one another. I know he has a lilac bush; it's tall enough to stick over the garage roof a little.
Solid gold soul.
