Another Neighbor Story

I was outside a few days ago, an hour and a half into trying to break up two solid inches of ice on the sidewalk in front of my house before the next foot of snow dropped on top of it, when a ginormous man with a huge smile and no excess of front teeth stopped to laugh at my efforts.

He started talking about the house of dubious repute that my principle domicile had principally been up until recently, including a story that he was witness to about how the woman of the house sold the man of the house to another man for drugs and then they had a cop-drawing fight when the man of the house claimed that he was made to do all said drugs with the client as part of the encounter and had nothing left to give to her, and I cracked (bad pun for which I shamelessly now bow down) that well, at least I could not help but to be a better neighbor. He talked about how the 'hood had gotten to a bad place lately and I said, well, we just got to get together on this and start talking to each other, and maybe even think about, come summer, closing off the street and throwing some block parties. His eyes opened up at that, -- "Block parties??!!!" -- and we got to talking about how March makes you long for the warm weather more than anything, and how we couldn't wait to get to barbecuing again, and then into food in general, and then he told me about the soul food restaurant he used to own, and I went Pavlovian on his ass and allowed as how it had been too long since I'd had some good soul food, and he looked at me like the ofay that I am, and I told him about my formative years growing up with friends whose people came from down Virginia whose favorite thing to say at the big reunions was, "Get in here and watch this white boy eat some collard greens! Lord have mercy!", and he said he was from Louisiana and I really started slobbering, and before I could mention my love for étouffée and jambalaya, he was all red beans and rice and "you got to come over for dinner!" We were just starting to argue about who made better cornbread when the wind picked up.

I didn't want to talk about this before, for fear of putting the whammy on it, but I just had a serious hunger pang, and all I can say now is: Come on, warm weather.