When I was growing up, we lived on a street that had
four-foot, chain-link fences around the yards.
It was easy to climb over them to get to the yard next door, which CC
and I did all the time. He lived next
door to me, and we were like brothers, so there wasn’t a day that went by that
we didn’t play together. Our favorite
game was to spy on the neighbors, and our favorite neighbor to spy on was Mr.
Ed.
Mr. Ed was a bachelor that lived two houses down from me. He was an awesome man that took time to talk
to us like we were important, shared his Girl Scout cookies with us (he liked
the lemon ones), and endured our incessant “kidness” with boundless
patience. But he also intrigued us,
because he lived alone. We couldn’t
figure out why a great guy like that would be alone. Oh we had some theories, like he was gay, but
he never had anyone over to confirm or deny.
He was in his thirties and not bad looking, so why didn’t he have a
family? It made no sense to our naïve
childlike minds. We need more data. So, we did the only decent thing to do in
that situation…we spied on him.
One night, after it was dark, we crept into his yard behind
the bushes and looked into his windows.
He was bustling around the house, doing normal things like eating dinner,
washing dishes, or reading a book. Nothing
covert or newsworthy. This went on for
quite a while, when all of a sudden all of the lights in the house went
off. It was only around seven or eight
o’clock, so we were stunned that he would be going to bed so early. We strained our eyes to see into the dark, to
make out shapes, movement, anything. But
there was nothing.
We had just decided to abandon our post and head home when
someone grabbed us from behind. We let
out two high-pitched shrieks and tried to flee, but our assailant held on
firmly to our shirts. I chanced a look
back and stared directly into the grinning face of Mr. Ed. He apparently had caught a glimpse of us
staring into the windows and decided to reverse the tables on us. So, he had gone along as if he didn’t suspect
anything, then suddenly turned out the lights and climbed out his bedroom
window. We had been so absorbed with
things inside the house, that we weren’t paying attention to dark figure
stealthily creeping up on us outside the house.
He wasn’t mad or anything. In
fact, he seemed downright proud of himself that he had out “spied” us. That’s just how Mr. Ed was.
Not long after, we found out that he was actually an
engineer that worked at a petroleum company in Houston. He was not gay, just taking his time, and he
eventually got married and moved away.
That was a very sad day for us…and for him, I like to think. The neighbors that bought his house were not
nearly as awesome as Mr. Ed. We lost
touch with him after he moved, and I can only hope now that he found all of the
happiness that he deserved from life. I
hope he had many kids that he could play with and share Girl Scout cookies
with. I suspect that he would make a
great father.
