Thank You for My Neighbor’s Hammer Potential

 

The roads are flooded, Farms are flooded. The rain has been the only driving thing on some local highways for days on end. Forty miles away, in Canada, they are declaring a disaster area.

So you can imagine my relief when, at midnight last night, I heard my neighbor hammering. 

I woke up, just a little, and whispered into the pillow “Thank goodness somebody decided to build an Ark.”

Then I woke up a little more and realized the rain had stopped.

The hammering did not. And I don’t think my neighbor is a boating sort of guy. He’s an apartment dweller, not a mariner.

The tap tap thump went on with intermittent changes of meter; thump thump, tap for almost an hour.

My cat, Isabel, was sleeping near my foot. She was doing one of those running in sleep dances which makes me think she’s dreaming about being a larger cat, prowling in the wilds of Africa instead of being an eight pound kitty at the foot of a fluffy bed. She woke up a little confused and looked at me. 

I read her mind; Is that tribal drumming? Where’s the gazelle I just took down? Who are you? Where’s my lion king boyfriend? And again, Hey, is that tribal drumming?

Tap tap thump. The hammering went on into the wall next to my bed.

Then I was all the way awake and Isabel was reacclimatized to her real world environment staring at the wall.

My brain started building images of the man next door. I don’t know his name but I’m pretty sure it’s not Noah.

I don’t make eye contact with this man in the elevator or the lobby because the sounds of his lifestyle coming through my wall is as intimate as I want to get.

But my brain has no personal boundaries so it poked into his apartment to spy on him with imaginary guesses at what the hammering was all about.

Oh, he must be hanging things on the wall that connects our not-quite-living-togetherness. I imagined a framed Ph.D. in hammer swinging, an achievement award for midnight marine building, an Elvis painting on black velvet of the king playing a hammer instead of a guitar.

My brain seeped through the lone sheet of drywall that separates me from my mysterious neighbor and brought back mental pictures of him waving his hammer around, grinning like a maniac, crazy-eyed, searching for something to pound on.

I decided not to yell through the wall and offend him with “Hey! Shaddup! I’m tryin’ to sleep over here!”

I might want to stay on his good side. 

It could start raining again and that hammer might come in handy if he does know how to build an ark.

 

 

 

Advertisement

~ by leakelley on January 9, 2009.