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Dear Reader,
Every morning at 4:30 I used to have a front row seat to a concert because my neighbor's swimming pool pump is right near my bedroom window. Normally I enjoy a front row seat, but the pump sounded like it was running dry--moaning and groaning, trying to muster up one last hurrah before it collapsed in the final movement and the curtain was drawn.
My usual problem solving approach is to deal with a problem immediately. But when it comes to complaining to neighbors, I've become a scaredy-cat and with good reason.
The last time I tried to solve a problem with a neighbor, hurricane winds had knocked out all of our power. Our neighbor's house still had electricity, so I asked the woman next door if I could run an extension cord over the fence, and she was happy to oblige. But when her husband came home he was furious. "Electricity is expensive and just how much electricity do you plan on using?" her husband was yelling through my front screen door.
When I offered to pay in advance, he felt like a Scrooge and backed down. But those memories were still too fresh, so instead of telling my neighbor about the noisy pump, I opted for my husband's approach: ignore the problem and hope it goes away. But it didn't.
Too many weeks later, I finally did what I should have done in the first place. I simply went over to my neighbors, knocked on the door and explained the situation. My neighbor said he'd been out of town for a week and the pump timer must have malfunctioned while he was gone. He apologized and assured me he'd fix the problem immediately.
I refrained from pointing out that the noisy pump had been howling longer than one week, because what did it matter? The man was going to take care of the problem, and he did--kind of--I did enjoy one week of early morning silence, but then the 4:30 a.m. concert returned.
What was the matter with the man? Couldn't he hear that noisy pump? So at 4:30 the next morning, when the symphony started playing, I hit the record button on my tape recorder. The plan was to share the music when my neighbor got home from work. But that afternoon Rudy, my 18-year-old cat, disappeared.
Four days later when Rudy still hadn't been found and I'd given up hope of ever seeing him again, the neighbor with the loud pump knocked on my door and asked if I was missing a white cat. Strange noises had been coming from underneath his house in the middle of the night. So in the morning he pulled down the picket skirting around his front porch and when his wife crawled underneath, there was Rudy. His collar had gotten tangled around a pipe.
Finding Rudy underneath their house, my neighbors have a forever free pass. I'm sure the pool pump is still doing its thing at 4:30 a.m., but noise is a funny thing--now you hear it and suddenly now I don't. Heck my neighbors could even dance naked on their roof top and I wouldn't even notice--well hardly!
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
http://www.DearReader.com
P.S. It's cookie time. To enter this month's Chocolate Chip Giveaway and to see photos of past winners, go to: http://tinyurl.com/mc6pwh
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