The Neighborhood Test
Almost four years ago, a fellow bought a house around the corner from us, in the small town in Central Maine where Pudentilla is fortunate enough to live. We’ll call him Mr. Dodo. Like most places in New England, this is a friendly, but reserved town. In a jam, anyone will help you, but day-to-day it’s a smile and a wave. You get to know folks at town meetings, church and the hardware store, when parents bring the kids on bottle drive, cookie sales and Halloween.
We hoped to get to know Mr. Dodo at church, but it turns out, he doesn’t go to any of the churches in town. We have churches for conservative Baptists and New England Unitarians. The Catholics, it’s true, have to go to a parish just over the town line, but it’s a small town. There are a lot of folks in town who choose not to go to any church at all, and we don’t recall anyone ever even commenting on the fact until Mr. Dodo moved into the neighborhood. Folks found it odd that he talked so much about God whenever they chatted with him, but they never saw him in a pew. They found it really odd they way he blasted politicians as godless, when he couldn’t get his own knees to a kneeler a few weekends a month. Now when Mr. Dodo goes godly on us, if we happen to find ourselves in conversation with him in a line at the grocery store, we just smile politely and nod. (story)
We hoped to get to know Mr. Dodo at the bottle drive and fund raisers for our volunteer fire department. But he never showed up. Folks thought that this was odd, because, when the shed on his property caught fire when he was burning leaves one autumn, the fire department showed up and put the fire out. Saved his barn and house, too. But, Mr. Dodo doesn’t think he needs to support the first responders in our little town. (story).
What has everyone alarmed, however, was the way Mr. Dodo has responded to a problem our town has been confronting. Some of the local kids, for reasons that make sense only to post-pubescent males, took to riding their all terrain vehicles pretty recklessly on the roads in town and across meadows and lawns that belong to people other than themselves. We have a pretty tight ordinance regulating where you can drive these things, and these kids were obviously violating it. At a town meeting, Mr. Dodo complained loudly, and we all agreed to ask the local sheriff to talk to the kids and straighten them out. Well before the town manager could even call the sheriff, Mr. Dodo decided he had enough. “I hear they’re a drug gang,” he told everyone he saw. Then he went on to the property of every body in town who owned an ATV and slashed the tires of the potentially offending vehicles. You can’t imagine the uproar, especially when it turned out that none of the kids in question had anything to do with drugs. (story).
Last week, things got really bad. The local kids were furious about their ATVs. Mr. Dodo had forgotten that kids who own ATVs also tend to own pickup trucks and motorcycles. The kids, in a fearsome mood, spent the week tearing down the roads in town, leaving a trail of rubber and smoke, and setting every dog in every house (including Pudentilla’s) barking like banshees when they passed. Folks were angry and furious and the town manager called an emergency town meeting for Tuesday evening. On Monday, matters only escalated. Mr. Dodo declared that he knew who the ringleader of rubber trail brigade was, and that he couldn’t afford to wait for any sheriff or town manager to protect him. He made a molotov cocktail and threw it into the house of the fellow he claimed was causing all the trouble. Fortunately, a neighbor saw the flames and called the volunteer fire brigade, who managed to put the fire out before it could take down the house or let it spread to any neighbor’s property. It turned out that the fellow who Mr. Dodo thought was causing all the trouble wasn’t even home. He’s in the Guard in Iraq and his tour’s been extended again.
Well, we had the town meeting on Tuesday, and as you might imagine, everyone’s anger had shifted to Mr. Dodo. The oddest thing was how furious Mr. Dodo was with the rest of us. “I did what I thought was best!” he shouted. “Was I supposed to wait until I had your approval to go on to that miscreant’s property? Do I have to pass some “neighborhood test” before I can protect myself?” Well the town manager tried to explain that the “neighborhood test” came after the fact. The question was, could Mr. Dodo explain now why he had broken the law and put people’s lives in danger. The town rather felt that if Mr. Dodo’s information turned out to be as bad as rotting pumpkins, then he flunked the “neighborhood test.”
Mr. Dodo appears to think that he should have passed the “neighborhood test” because he was so sure he was right before he took action. Indeed, he appears to think that because his certainty was so strong, he should have to face no “neighborhood test” at all. Indeed, he appears to think that the strength of his certainty before the fact should absolve him from any responsibility for the fact that he was completely wrong. The only good news in all of this mess is the rumor that Mr. Dodo may be losing his job this fall. Something about outsourcing. Folks are trying to be Christian about it, but secretly we're all hoping it's true, because from the point of view of folks in town, Mr. Dodo, has flunked the neighborhood test.
