Having warmed up the old confessional yesterday with an account of Tuesday night's out-of-house experience, I'm now ready to relate the details of another, bigger out-of-house experience which occurred a mere two days earlier. 
     Yes, it was on Sunday - the same Sunday which had me thrilling to the sights and sounds of a furnace reignited for the first time in months - that I actually went out my door to Parts Elsewhere.  Big day, Sunday was - and just the first day of what has turned into a big week.
     However does the human body withstand such extreme excitement?

     It was about 2:30 in the afternoon.  I left my house and crossed the street to my neighbor's house.  I went inside.  The fact that my neighbor wasn't home at the time made it easy to go from room to room without the distraction of having to maintain a conversation.  I'd never been in her house before, so everything was new to me: The shallow closets, the full basement, the old refrigerator with rounded corners, the tap water that came from a well instead of the city.  I resisted the impulse to open the kitchen drawers and the medicine cabinet, just as I resisted the urge to poke my head up into the small attic.  My neighbor would never have known if I had, but it just didn't seem right all the same.
     After settling for a few long, final looks into the bedrooms and the garage, I returned to my own house, sorrier than ever that my neighbor had died back in June....

     Had I done what I did Sunday some five months ago, I could now be serving 10-15 years in a state penitentiary.  As it was, I had actually been invited to come over and poke around by the "Open House" sign a realtor had placed in the front yard.  Even so, I felt uncomfortable the entire time, as if the violation of a recently deceased person's privacy merited at least a good fine and a few mandatory classes in proper respect.
     It would have been worse had the realtor not been right there, urging me on and forcing into my hands the most intimate details of the building, the lot, and how I could make it all my own.  I had, in fact, gone over more as a prospective buyer than as a merely nosy neighbor.  Still, there are some things just not meant for man to know, and the interior color schemes used in the 1950s clearly falls into that category even if the private tastes of a recently deceased neighbor do not....

     It turned out to be a much smaller house than I imagined possible.  I left my home on Sunday with the little boy inside me still thinking that every house is a mansion compared to any of the apartments I grew up in.  I came back knowing that that's simply not so.  My neighbor's house is basically a simple square, with living room in one corner, kitchen in another, and a couple of small bedrooms in the back two.  Small bath between the two bedrooms.  A narrow attached garage too small for both a car and a lawnmower.  Typical basement.  That's it. 
     No matter how I position my head, I can't imagine who might pay the $57,000 it would take to make the place their Home Sweet Home....

      My neighbor had lived there 40 years.  She was 85 when she died, but could have passed for 70.  Remembering back to her animated tales of her life and how the area had changed, I found it difficult to believe that such a small dwelling had actually held such an expansive personality for a month, let alone four decades.  Recalling how well-spoken and almost regal she had been up to the end, I find myself thinking again and again that she deserved something better than four walls that hadn't been painted since I was a toddler and a refrigerator of the sort I hadn't seen since 1968....

     This isn't the first time I've been struck by "abode dissonance" - a wild mismatch between person and home.  I used to live next to a barbershop as a kid, and the head barber always struck me as a friendly, learned professional akin to the landlord we had at the time who owned the hardware store we lived above.  The two men lived on the same block across the street from us, and I had occasion to visit both over the years.  Our landlord lived in a big house with formal white walls and a grand piano, right in the living room.  The barber lived in a small, tawdry apartment with a portable black and white TV perched atop what now seems to have been a crate.  To this day I don't quite understand this extreme difference in the lifestyles of two people who seemed equally intelligent and personable, and more or less of equal height and weight. 
     But then to this day I don't understand much of anything at all....

     If my neighbor was somehow watching my recent visit to her old home, I trust that she didn't mind too much.  I trust that she knows that I went in hopes of giving her place the love and care it deserves.  Maybe she even smiled at the prospect of my cat continuing the tradition started by her own pet of sitting in the kitchen window - for certainly if her cat had to leave, that would be better than a total stranger's pitbull taking over, would it not? 
     Well, if nothing else, I assuage my guilt by trusting that if the dead can in fact watch things, there must be an awful lot out there more interesting to see than some goofball wandering through an old house.  I mean, if heaven doesn't at least get cable, the hell with it, you know?

     Ok, ok - I admit it: I was bad.  Bad to violate the sanctity of my neighbor's longtime residence by going over at all.  Bad to try to cover up my embarassment and guilt over doing so with smartass comments in another shitty little journal entry.
     Don't worry - my punishment is now assured.  Whenever I go out in public again, whenever I contemplate the strangers who read my journal, I'll be tortured by an unending stream of nagging questions:
     "Do they think I live in a condo or a flophouse?  Does this body of mine look like it's just come from a bungalow or a slum?  Is this smile of mine perceived as that of a cheap motel resident or a hospice patient?  Do my words imply a mind that resides in a jail cell or an asylum?!"
     Ack!  Time to go pull the shades and cower again, my innate human urge to explore be damned....