Jar of Goodness 3.6.22: Are the Neighbors Actually Moving?

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for even just the possibility that our neighbors across from us on Broadway might actually, finally be moving out.

They’ve been nighmares since they arrived. They do seem to be moving out, but we’re afraid to get our hopes up. Look, I won’t sully my blog or the internet any more with them, but let’s just say—if it’s so that they’re really moving away—then I’m indeed heartily grateful.

Thanksgiving: James Maute

During this season of thanksgiving, I’ve been writing posts of gratitude. Who are we thanking today?

Thank You, James Maute

Dear James,

I can’t tell you enough now grateful we are to have such a neighbor as you. You and your family have lived here on this same block with us for about twenty years, and you’ve been a great neighbor.

You keep an eye on things. You know who’s who and what’s what. The neighborhood is safer with you around.

You’re cordial, friendly, and fair.

You’re always offering to help with yard work and such. And wow, have you been helpful!

I will never forget how helpful you were to Lorie as her health was declining last fall and winter. You were a blessing to her and to her family. You were a blessing to her dogs and cats, too.

And your yard is a joy! It makes us happy when we drive or walk by. The flowerbeds are gorgeous, but the decorations add a lot of fun to the mix. People can see you have a sense of humor as well as an appreciation for beauty.

It makes us even happier to see you and your family sitting up there enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, the view from your perch overlooking the north end of Broadway.

I’m including some pictures of your yard I took this year. Here are some from early summer, when you first started planting things and getting the flowerbeds in order.

And here are pictures of your fall and Halloween decorations. Wow, how those plants grew!

I thought you’d like this picture of that citronella geranium you raised from a cutting. I know the citronella makes you think of Lorie.

And James, you’re fun to be around. We’ve enjoyed your occasional visits while we relax in the backyard.

James, this place wouldn’t be the same without you.

We’re glad you’re our neighbor.

Blessings to you.

Thank you.

Bluebird versus Honda Mirror

This is a new thing for me: a male bluebird attacking the mirror of a car. I've seen other birds (especially male cardinals!) engaging in this territorial behavior, but not a bluebird. So this is a first.

(A quick internet search revealed that American robins often attack their reflections in mirrors and windows, too, and bluebirds and robins are pretty closely related--they're both thrushes, look at their body shapes, legs, and bills--so it shouldn't be a surprise that both do it.)

Look! Mr. Bluebird was so obsessed with fighting his perceived interloper (who absolutely refused to leave and was always there in the mirror each time he looked), he let me get close enough for some pictures:



Oh, it was so hot last week! Maybe the bird was feeling extra peevish, nervous, and out-of-sorts. I didn't notice the bluebird doing this yesterday, when it was cooler. But on Thursday, when I took these pictures, it got up into the high nineties by midday, and at midmorning he was panting from his exertions.

Here's a fun quiz: "How can you tell when a bird's been attacking your car's mirrors?" Two pictures provide the answer:





. . . And how do you keep the birds away from your mirrors (if not to protect the mirrors, then at least to prevent the bird from hurting his bill or from getting heatstroke)? In the past, my parents have slipped a big old sock over their mirrors: easy on, easy off.

My solution was to tie a ubiquitous white plastic grocery bag around each mirror. It looks ridiculous, and it's a bit of a pain to untie them in order to drive somewhere . . . but at least it saves the bird from wasting his precious energy attacking a mirage.



Silly thing. There's a reason why calling someone a "birdbrain" is an insult.

Of course, after I put bags over my mirrors, he moved on to our neighbor's car.

And one final thought: Wowsa! We have bluebirds in our neighborhood!

We have not had a great number of, well, interesting songbirds in our neighborhood recently (of course; see post on cats below). We have the usual: bluejays, grackles, cardinals, sparrows, chickadees, catbirds, Carolina wrens, and occasional flocks of waxwings that come through. There are also plenty of chimney swifts and mourning doves, and a few Eurasian collared doves, as well.

But this summer we have seen at least three bluebirds (the male plus a female plus a female or immature male), which clearly are living somewhere in the area; I love their songs, those mellow little comments. And last night at sunset, we watched a kingbird repeatedly fly out from the top of the pine trees across the street.

It's been a real treat. I hope they all stick around!

I Can’t Miss It

Hi there—it’s time for another post; just an update, really. It hasn’t been a good month, much. Sue had a sudden, literally debilitating attack of sciatica—something she’s never had before—and she’s been gradually feeling better. But there have been doctor’s visits, tests, and a cortisone shot, and things are looking up at this point. But that shock set the unsettling tone for the month.

I.

But there’s more. All of last week—a week that began with pleasantly cool, fall-like weather—our friendly neighborhood slumlord got busy with some of his projects. Right across the street, he had a plumbing company tear out a section of sidewalk and part of the terrace to fix a water main that had been leaking water into the street for about a year.

You’d think that was a good thing, right, people fixing stuff up? But no, I’m going to complain about it: They didn’t fill in the hole. They made a little bit of an effort, but there’s still a big gouge in the terrace (you can see severed tree roots sticking out of it), and no one’s made any moves toward filling it and seeding it with grass. (We know from experience that this slumlord never bothers with such things—the ground remains uneven, with nothing but erosion to smooth the edges, and weeds eventually fill in on the surface.

We see this every time we look out our front windows: An eye-catching, big, ugly, brown hole. I can’t miss it.

II.

Also this week, this same slumlord had a tree cut down on one of his properties. But this wasn’t just one of the trash trees—hackberries, mimosa, white mulberry, Siberian elms, box elders that predominate on his rental holdings. It was a huge American elm (yes, the kind that you will never see large anymore because of Dutch elm disease). The slumlord never trimmed it, ever, and the limbs hung over its house. Sure enough, a long but smallish limb finally fell on the house (miraculously, it was a glancing blow and did not apparently cause any damage serious enough for the slumlord to bother with)—but this was the impetus for the slumlord to finally cut the entire tree down.

It was solid. It was a solid, huge, healthy American elm tree. Hard wood. It took the company nearly all week, with two big cherry-picker trucks, to cut it away, piece by piece. For days, I heard the growling, undulating whine of their chainsaws; the screams of the big chipper machine, instantaneously destroying all the small branches and green leaves; and then there were the huge thumps of the log sections hitting the ground.

Surely there’s a place in hell for tree cutters who agree to remove perfectly good, solid, American elm trees, when a trim job would have sufficed.

So, now, the front yard of that house, everything but the sloped terrace, is covered with firewood. It’s stacked all along the roadside. I guess the slumlord is thinking people will take it away for him. I suppose that’s cheaper than hauling it. And people in Jefferson City know what to do with things that are visible along the side of the road, that aren’t locked down. . . . So it just lays there, what’s left of that huge, rare tree.

I’d take a picture of it for you, but I don’t want to burn the sight into my memory. It makes me sick to see it, or to smell what fresh-cut American elm wood smells like. You’ll have to just imagine what a solid, 3-4 foot diameter core of a genuine American elm tree looks like. You’ll never see one again.

So every time I drive on our street, I have to pass by this obscenity. No matter how much I want to, no matter how much I try to look away, I can’t miss it.

III.

In an attempt to handle all this grievance, Monday night I finally got around to weeding our front “flower bed.” I put that in quotes because an infestation of field bindweed has made gardening in that quadrant of our yard a depressing, Sisyphean endeavor. Whatever grows out there gets covered with it. So I’m resigned to just keeping that flower bed trimmed, disinfected, the way Nazis and other evil captors shave the heads of their prisoners to kind of reduce the depredations of lice and fleas.

So with my anger, I decided I could do some yard work, and pulling weeds with my bare hands usually helps me let go of rage and frustration. But in this case: My heart stopped. Glancing at the corner of our house, I suddenly realized that our knusperhexe—our garden gnome—great-grandpa’s knusperhexe!—wasn’t there.

I mean—it wasn’t there—it had vanished—my heart stopped again, and so did my breath. Somebody had stolen it.

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I finished the weed-pulling, numbly, with sweat burning into my eyes and making my vision blur. This was definitely not helping me release frustration and anger.



The knusperhexe—grandma always pronounced it “knisperhexie”—has sat on that corner of the house as long as I can remember. So, for at least about fifty years, it’s gazed benignly out at passersby, adding a grandfatherly, elvish charm to the property. Before that, it was in other locations in the yard. I guess it’s been in the yard for about a hundred years, or at least since the thirties. For a while, in the forties, I guess, my great-grandfather had perched it on a strange piece of granite overlooking Broadway.

Look, I can’t even call it “my” gnome—like the house, like the Christmas tree—it is the family’s, and we are only the present caretakers. In a fit of naive happiness, I blogged about him in one of my earliest posts.

The front of the house looks bare without it. Characterless, incomplete, like nobody cares. In fact . . . it’s starting to look like the other houses on our street, which are all blighted rentals. Hey, we’re starting to fit in!

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Naturally, the theft has influenced the way I view my neighbors, and anyone who goes by on the street or sidewalk. People who drive by on the street. Ragpickers in their pickup trucks filled with junk. Where did they get that junk?

My first action was to approach neighbors, show them a photo of the missing gnome, and ask if they knew anything or saw anything, begged them to keep an eye open, told them I’d pay to get it back.

This activity was depressing in itself. Our closest and most decent neighbors, sitting and smoking on their front porch, just stared at me blankly and blandly: “Nope. We didn’t see anything. Sorry about that. Huh. If we see anything, we’ll let you know.”

The next people were the ones who have the American elm tree now strewn all over their lawn. (I had to actually walk through the remains of that noble tree in order to knock on their door. Or what’s left of their door; they’ve been really hard on the house.) After some moderate knocks, I eventually beat quite loudly on the door. Two females eventually stood in the doorway—but blocking the door, so I couldn’t see in—and spoke with me. The second woman blurted out, “Oh did someone take your garden gnome?” before she’d really had a chance to see the picture I’d brought with me. They, too, tried to seem sympathetic but shook their heads and couldn’t offer me anything. (Uh-huh, right . . .)

I had walked around their lawn for a few moments before knocking—since we had caught their children numerous times in our backyard (which is fenced), and we’ve caught them stealing from our backyard (an old birdhouse, thank goodness, nothing we truly care about) . . . it seemed like a good idea to just look around.

But it was a bad idea—filth! Greasy old rags, all manner of garbage, wrecked furniture; their backyard is a hellhole. Stench. And I didn’t see our gnome.

I realized something: Those people didn’t deserve to live in the shade of that beautiful American elm tree. It occurred to me that maybe that American elm committed suicide—dropped a limb on the house out of sheer exhaustion and sadness, knowing that it would trigger its execution. “Time for me to go away from here.” If a tree has a spirit, who could blame it?

I won’t go too much further into my notions about our neighbors. You get the idea. If any of them took our gnome, I could never find out, since it could be indoors or in their backyards, and judging from what I’ve seen of these people, I believe I could be shot if I went snooping around.

Next, of course, were the pawnshops and antiques stores and malls. Talking to these people educated me about the tremendous value that “vintage” yard statues can carry. Like those little yard donkeys, “lawn jockeys,” and cutesy Dutch kissing boy and girl. Vintage, vintage, vintage.

We’ve been to a lot of antiques malls in the past few days, and this vintage stuff, and the market for it—the high prices, the anonymous, questionable sources—has become increasingly disgusting to me. Somewhere, there’s a good chance that our family’s heirloom knusperhexe is in just such a place, having gone from our yard to some dirty fleabag scavenger-thief, to some antiques seller in an antiques mall. “I got this at the estate sale of an old lady who kept it in her yard all her life . . .”

That’s how the descriptions read on eBay—but where do they really come from? I think about how heartbroken those old ladies would be if those yard statues had been stolen. How would you know? When you buy a treasure at an antiques mall, how do you know your purchase doesn’t represent the theft of a treasure, a broken heart?

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But I am making an effort to recover our gnome—I don’t think I could stand myself if I didn’t try. In addition to talking to our neighbors, and going to pawnshops and antiques malls in Central Missouri, I have:

—Filed a police report. Ha! From too much prior experience, I know this is probably the longest shot of all, the biggest waste of my time. Police don’t do anything except take notes and nod, and give you a report number. (Shit! At least, they could give you a cookie, or a candy cane, or something, besides that damn useless number!)

—Posted notices about it on Jefferson City Facebook sites. Why not?

—Put up a sign in our front flower bed where the gnome used to be, and another on the utility pole on our street corner: “GARDEN GNOME. Reward: $250. Please help us recover our family heirloom.” . . . I’m actually kind of hopeful about this, because last night I saw a truly suspicious-looking woman walking rather slowly west along Elm Street. She was pasty white, blond, smoking, wearing sunglasses at sunset, holding a cell phone, and looking into everyone’s yard, on both sides of the street, up above the terraces near the houses—as if she was looking for something. “Good Vibes” read her black T-shirt (isn’t that an adult toys company?). Anyway, what a classy-looking lady.

It’s possible that she was looking for her dog, or looking for her own stolen yard statue—because apparently thieves go through areas stealing from lots of properties at a time . . . but maybe, if she’s the thief, she’ll come by again and see our sign, and “just happen to recover” our statue. “Hey, look here, someone left this statue in our yard and I don’t know where it come from. I think it’s yours! Can I have the reward money?” After suppressing an urge to clap her with a brick on the side of her skull, I would indeed cough up the money, because I really want our knisperhexe back, even if I have to pay a ransom.

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But then . . . I know it’s an impossibly long shot. The theft, we think, for detailed reasons I won’t go into now, probably occurred at the very end of July, leaving at least three weeks before I noticed it missing (remember: the first few weeks of August were a crisis here, with Sue’s pain and disability, and weeds grew up, obscuring where Mr. Knisperhexie sat—all my fault, but still . . .).

I know I have to accept that I’ll never see our house’s guardian gnome again. I acknowledge it: He was stolen under “my watch.” I should’ve known he was “worth something.” I should’ve moved him into the backyard, or even into the house, a long time ago. But I kept a naive faith in the goodness of people, blah, blah, blah . . . And so we lost him.

But I can’t bear to miss him like this. For a week, now, I’ve been unable to sleep. I read and read, late into the night, trying to distract my mind and tire myself to sleep (I’m reading boring stuff, too—Samuel Johnson, even), until I can’t keep my eyes upon anymore, and as soon as I shut them I see the knusperhexe, sitting there, with that benign smile on his face . . . my stomach lurches, and I’m awake again, to gnaw away at Dr. Johnson, the Great Lexicographer, some more.

(Unable to sleep, that sick, lurching feeling, the downward spiral, unable to stand myself and my thoughts: it’s been a long time, but this is my major depression coming back to bite me.)

So what can I do now? How can I stop missing him? How can I glance at the corner of the house and miss the sight of his gaping absence? I can’t miss it.

I’ve decided I have to move on; I need to find a way to conceptualize this so that I’m not flat-out hating everyone I see, not wanting to drop a brick onto people passing by on the street, not wanting to blow up our ratlike neighbors and their houses. Not wishing the darkest evil on our friendly neighborhood slumlord, and not wanting to puke on the invertebrate city leaders who could never do anything that might impose on a landlord’s convenience or profitability.

It’s a good thing I’m not a magical creature, a gnome, because a lot of folks would be suffering right now, and not just me.

These thoughts led me to a new, more expansive consideration:

Maybe there is something magical, mysterious, about these elderly garden gnomes. Maybe, like I fancy with that American elm, our gnome somehow decided it was time to move on, get away from this blight. Maybe his magical work here was done. Maybe some other person or family needs his presence more than we do. Maybe someone will buy him for $200 at a flea market and treasure him like crazy. Maybe, in his second century of existence, he will be more beloved than ever before. And for us, maybe it’s time to have a new yard sprite around here—kind of a “changing of the guards.” . . . I think I’m open to that.

But if we do get another gnome, he’s going to preside over the back yard. Which we will soon be fencing in the rest of the way. No one will get to see our backyard anymore.



And that’s what’s been going on around here. I know I started this blog to get away from depressing subjects, to celebrate things that make me happy. And usually, I try to be upbeat about our Munichburg neighborhood, and its gradual progress up from slumland, but these last few weeks, we’ve been fantasizing about moving far away from here. This time, I just couldn’t miss the bad stuff.

We Can Always Talk About the Weather

We really haven't had much precipitation this winter. Hardly any snow to speak of. I guess today Columbia, half an hour's drive north of us, has had some accumulation, but so far in Jeff City, all we've had is freezing rain.

Which I hate.

But at least I don't have to go anywhere, and we have plenty to eat here at home. And as long as I have Internet, I can communicate with you! Whoever you are.

Here are some pictures I took out of our top windows only about a half hour ago.

First, a view out of our top dormer looking north along Broadway toward the 50/63 Expressway and the capitol. (Well, we call it "north" here in Jeff City, because the river is "north." But let's not get into all that.) In the distance, the big building on the left, with the horizontal pattern to the windows, is the Truman State Office Building. The next building to the right of it, is the Broadway State Office Building. The next one to the right (red brick; in front of the capitol) is the Missouri State Supreme Court building:



Next, a view "west" along West Elm. Apart from our dear neighbor's house (happy birthday, Kay!), there's not a lot you might recognize here. The large rectangular building in the background is the newly former St. Mary's Hospital. The bright "light" almost in the center of the picture is the Dulle mansion:



Looking out our front dormer window, we see Broadway heading south. The former salon is in the foreground. The Schaeffer House (gift shop) is about halfway down the block, on the opposite side of the street. The green light is the traffic light at the intersection with Dunklin.

And no, that's not snow along the edges of the sidewalks, and that's not rain making the sidewalks shiny--it's ice:



Finally, here's the view along West Elm, to the east. That big tree two houses away from us is a real, genuine American elm tree, which somehow survived the dreaded Dutch elm disease. Also, you can't see it very well in this picture, but the one landmark a Jefferson Citian might know is the Coca-Cola Building. The "Coke Room" community room is at the end of the block. The famous Coke signboard is a bright spot with a small pointy projection at the top, roughly between the elm's trunk and the bright orange streetlight in the center. It's shaped like a candle because we're seeing it at an angle. (There's a picture of it on this post.)



Plus, a bonus picture: My car, with ice falling on it! I'm so glad I don't have to go out anywhere tonight or tomorrow!



Wherever you are, be careful driving (and walking!) in whatever foul weather you might be having. Take care!

Icy Day

Hi, folks! Today, we’re experiencing one of the lesser-celebrated forms of wintry precipitation here in Central Missouri: an ice storm!

Fortunately, it’s not exactly stormy. Fortunately, “ice storm” is just the generic term for this kind of freezing rain. It’s rained mostly all day, and so far, here in Jefferson City, only elevated objects (tree branches and twigs, porch railings, and power lines) seem to have acquired a glaze.



But it’s after 3 pm, now, and temperatures will be falling. In the time it’s taken me to write this, the icicles have lengthened! Our yew trees are getting all splayed out from the weight of the ice.

It’s supposed to change over into snow at some point, though most of the precipitation is supposed to be north and west of us.

Even though we’re safe inside, we’re a bit on edge about the possibility of breaking branches and downed power lines. But it’s also very beautiful. I’d rather focus on that.



I feel sorry for people who have to travel through this today. Even if you manage to stay on the road and reach your destination, it’s not going to be very fun.

Here’s a view from our front windows, looking south on Broadway. (Here are some older posts with pictures of the same overall view, both from the big snowstorm in January 2011: here and here.)



So it’s a good day to stay inside! We have so much food around here I didn’t even go to the store to get the requisite “milk and bread.” For lunch, I had leftovers from Jefferson City’s new Indian (and Nepalese, and Korean) restaurant. I’ve got the lights on the Christmas tree turned on, and our little electric fake fireplace space heater is on, too.

I’m all warm and cozy. Soon I’ll make myself a nice hot cup of masala chai—thanks to my brother for sending us some boxes of easy-peasy instant chai packets, I don’t have to do anything but heat up water, dump in some powder, and stir! (Click here to learn more about this instant chai.)

Maybe I’ll even have some lebkuchen or springerles with it!

As you can guess, this ice storm is feeling like a really nice thing!

Let’s hope the power doesn’t go out! And if you’re planning to travel on these icy roads? . . . Stop it! Find a way to just stay home, be safe, and enjoy a quiet evening!

Take care, my friends!

Holiday Distractions

We’re way behind schedule for this year’s holiday preparations. I’m kind of giving up hope that we’ll be able to accomplish the usual baking, decorating, and gift-procuring activities, and once again I think Christmas cards will go by the wayside. I used to send out handmade cards every year, with a “newsletter” included.

Yes, we have excuses. No, I’m not going to go into them. We had a difficult fall and are now in “recovery” mode. We’re basically going through the motions of Christmastime in hopes that the familiar holiday distractions will help us get back to “normal” quicker. And by the time we’re on the other side of the holidays—in January—maybe life will seem more “routine.”

But there are plenty of other distractions. Last weekend, for instance, we put up the tree (the Weinachtspyramide)—two weeks later than we ordinarily do—and my folks came over Sunday evening for a visit, and for soup.

I made a nice, healthy vegan black bean soup. And as I was in the kitchen off and on, Sunday, I noticed activity at our neighbors’ house. Even though we have our nice privacy fence, I have a direct view to the sole entryway to the upstairs apartment in the house just north of us. It’s second-floor to second-floor, and I see them going in and out when I look out my kitchen window, the one right above the sink.

By the way, their door is pathetic. I think the previous owners of the house had installed an indoor-rated door for this outside entry. I think that’s why the outer layers of wood have peeled off during the tenures of two or three renters of that place. The landlord should be ashamed of this door. Surely it’s not up to code. That door says, “Slum, slum, slum.” (And—grimace—I look at it every day.)

Well, Sunday this couple apparently moved out. It didn’t take them long. I don’t think they had a lot of stuff. They are poor.

They’re also messed up—like many people in the low-income housing in Munichburg. “Poor” and “messed up” naturally go hand-in-hand. Sometimes we’re furious at such people, when they disturb our sleep, and our peace, with their inconsiderate, loud “whatever.” Poor doesn’t have to mean “uncouth.”

Anyway, this couple has serious challenges. We weren’t spying on them, but we couldn’t help noticing things. They have two little kids—a baby girl and a boy who’s about three or four. “She” works—I think at a hotel uptown, as a maid or something—and they don’t have a car, so she walks to work every day. “He” has never seemed to have a job.

Actually, for a long time, he seemed to be a pretty good stay-at-home daddy. We decided we like the couple. They’re reasonably quiet, for the most part, and seem to take care of their children.

But “he” has been trouble, off and on; we finally decided he’s fairly worthless as a father and partner. He has some friends or relatives—men—with whom he tends to get reinvolved every once in a while, and they apparently are into drugs, or whatever. They tended to come over and “hang around” with him while she was away at work.

She has kicked his sorry ass out of the house at least once or twice. A few years ago they had a spectacular fight on a Palm Sunday morning—swearing and throwing each other’s stuff out the door. (Remember, this is a second-floor apartment, with just a single rickety-seeming wooden staircase leading up to the small landing outside their door.)

That morning, we were sitting on our back porch, enjoying coffee and breakfast, the pretty spring daylight, the birds chirping, the fresh green that had sprung up everywhere . . .

The fight started with shouting and stamping and slamming doors. Then we watched a boombox sail out the door and heard its brittle crash on the ground below. Then came handfuls of CDs. Then came a blanket and wads of clothing. She was throwing his stuff, and he was throwing hers. Then they went inside and apparently commenced hitting each other.

We didn’t need to call the police for this neighborhood incident, as apparently the people downstairs from this couple had called before us. The cops showed up presently and put an end to the altercation. (As for the junk they threw, it littered the yard for months afterward; no one ever picked it up. The landlord’s brutish yard guy just kicked the stuff aside or simply mowed over it, CDs and all.)

From what we could gather, she had discovered that he’d been involved with those no-good loser friends of his, and (I’ll bet) he had run them out of money, or in some other way betrayed or failed her.

So he was gone for a long time after that—but he came back, apparently somehow mending his ways. And I should also point out that, to this couple’s credit, as far as it’s worth, right before they commenced that big fight, the fellow had quickly carried their little boy (who was then about two) down the steps and put him into their then-car—so that the little guy didn’t have to see his parents fight.

Of course, they shouldn’t have been fighting at all, but considering that they did, it was good of them to try to protect their children from it. You have to give them credit for that.

Anyway, in recent months, they seem to have gotten into a relatively stable pattern. They’ve walked together to pick up their children from daycare. We hear them vacuuming, see them taking out their trash. Doing normal stuff. They have friends and family drop by, we hear talking and laughing, and it’s seemed pretty decent over there.

But we’ve noticed that he seems to have become preoccupied with talking on his cell phone, recently, and not watching the children. Maybe he got into trouble again.

Anyway—on Sunday they moved out. They had plastic storage bins and laundry baskets full of stuff on their landing, and friends to help carry it to awaiting cars. And the landlord showed up. When we saw him standing around up there, walking inside the apartment with them, we knew that was it. Although I’d like to hope that they had accumulated enough income to move into a better place, my guess is they couldn’t make the rent, and he made them move out.

And that was Sunday.

As usual with our neighborhood’s rentals, we wonder what kind of people will move in to replace them. Will they be outright drug dealers? Will they litter their yard with trash? Will they play thumping music incessantly in their house, in their cars? Will they scream curses all the time? Or what? Can we get relatively lucky two times in a row?

We scarcely knew this couple, but we grew used to seeing them. I rather liked them, or at least her—I got the idea that even though they were messed up, they were at least trying. She would probably be much better off if she told him to take a hike. She doesn’t need him. And he would be better off if he grew a backbone and learned to say “no” to his no-good “friends,” got a job, found a direction in life, became a man.

Wonder where they’ve gone, and where they’ll go?

Anyway—I was just trying to make my bean soup and focus on the “joy” of the season—and there they were, carrying their little boxes of stuff down the stairs. It makes me sad that they lost their apartment the week before Christmas. I do wish them well.

New Sidewalks!

Thanks to the Old Munichburg Association’s CID (Community Improvement District), the 500 and 600 blocks of Broadway are getting new sidewalks, curbs, and gutters this year!

It’s all happening very quickly, and it’s just grand.

They tore out the busted-up old sidewalks on our part of Broadway on Monday; built the frame for the new sidewalk Tuesday, and Wednesday they poured the concrete.

When they left that day, the new sidewalks were set enough we could walk on them!

While the contractor’s in the area, we’ve had our front sidewalk (which is not part of the CID) and our driveway replaced, too!

They put in our new driveway this morning!

It’s been hard to work this week, with all the commotion out the windows!

We’ve owned this house for more than a decade, now, and although I had spent a lot of time at first picking weeds out of the cracks or spraying Roundup, I finally gave up on that. Instead, whenever I finished cutting the grass, I’d set the mower on its lowest setting and mow the sidewalks.

Yes, I’d mow the sidewalks. The driveway, too!

But I can scratch that off my list now! We will always remember 2012!

To celebrate, I want to share with you the song I’ve had stuck in my head all week.

Enjoy!

Munichburg Online!

Hey, folks, I’m way behind the game here, but I wanted to tell you about a new blog! It’s called “Munichburg Memories,” and I’m sure it will appeal to all you folks who are interested in Jefferson City and German American history.

The blog is sponsored by the Old Munichburg Association, and it’s written by my dad, who’s a retired professor from the University of Missouri and is a professional geographer. One of his longstanding interests is the historical geography of Missouri, and this blog is one way he can share some of the wealth of information he’s got stored in his noggin.

The tone of the posts varies a bit (Dad’s new at “blogging”!), but I think that’s just fine. Some of them are heartwarming and nostalgic, some of them reflect his career as an educator.

My favorites are the ones that tell his quirky growing-up stories, like the post about Herr Goldammer’s glass eyeball, and the ones that illustrate the past by describing particular episodes in precise and personal detail (like the post about how my grandpa’s barbershop was integrated). The humorous ones kind of remind me of Jean Shepherd’s Christmas Story.

(By the way, I’m one of the administrators for the blog, which is one reason my posts here at the Op Op have been kind of thin lately; I’m just busy, with a lot of fun stuff!)

I really hope you’ll bookmark Munichburg Memories and visit it often, because it’s full of interesting nuggets about Jefferson City’s Southside and the German immigrant experience. And, it’s just fun!