If I Only Had a Blog

Naked Neighbor

Ok, this sounds like a “Friends” episode…but I promise you, I am referring to one of my former neighbors at my parents house. And, yes, I mean naked in the whole sense of the word. Not only was he a naked neighbor, he was a strange neighbor. He was a hairy naked Neanderthal. I’m almost positive he was single, although sometimes we did see a red Mustang outside of his house. It wasn’t his car because he didn’t own one. He walked everywhere. Of course, in Cahaba Heights that’s easy to do. Speaking of walking, one day Leslie and mom were taking a morning walk around 6 am. NN (that’s what I’ll call him for short) was in his house screaming with the front door wide open. Leslie and Mom made sure to take a different route home.

Let me paint the picture for you. NN has an old small house. His front door and back door are connected with one straight hallway that has the rooms on either side. His kitchen sink faces the back of the house. And it just so happens that his house is at the top of a hill, facing you as you drive up this hill. The hill is a pretty popular route for our neighborhood and a vet office. Point is, he’s hard to miss. Especially when the front and back doors are open and he is washing dishes at his kitchen sink with absolutely no clothes on, which he did on numerous occasions. It gets worse. He has been spotted, by me (everything I am talking about here, I have seen with my own eyes and I don’t lie), sitting in his boxers in his front yard in a “canoe” rowing somewhere. He would occasionally pull out his “binoculars” I guess to find land and would continue rowing. You may be wondering, how did you see him do all of these things in the short time that you passed his house? First of all, I always drove slow so I didn’t miss anything. Second, I always made sure to have a reason to drive back by his house a few minutes/hours later to see what he was up to. This particular time, he was rowing on the way up the hill and he was using his binoculars from the canoe on the way down the hill.

One night on our way home from church, we were frightened by a huge Spongebob pillow hanging from a tree. Imagine driving down a dark road with lots of trees and all of the sudden seeing a huge yellow thing with bug eyes and a huge smile staring at you. It freaked me out and for a while I would not drive on that road at night. That was until I saw Spongebob hanging on NN’s porch one day.

NN was known for hanging things on his porch. He kept a skeleton up from Halloween about 6 months after the holiday. Some of our sane neighbors had to explain to their children that NN was “Mixed-Up Calendar Man” and got confused with holidays. Not only did he hang things on his porch, he liked to duct tape things in trees. For at least a year, he had gnomes randomly duct taped to the trees in his yard.

One night my dad was on his way home around 2 am (not sure why) and he saw NN unclothed with the doors open. My dad drove to the police station at the bottom of the hill to inform them. The police just laughed at him and said they weren’t going near his house.

NN was a special man and a neighbor to never be forgotten. Unfortunately, he has moved and the property is for sale. But I must say, I’m glad he’s gone and I hope he clothes himself in his new house.

**PS, I will have a Christmas post as soon as I get pictures from Dad.