The Last of the Red-Hot Neisghborhood Watchers
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http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/thelastoftheredhotneighborhoodwatchers.mp3
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The Queen of Southside Birmingham is dead.
Long live the Queen.
Our 92-year-old neighbor Margaret Selman left us happy. She wanted nothing more than to join her late husband and best friend, Frank, and she died smiling and excitedly talking about the prospect. She left us neighbors happy—happy with good memories of the way she ran the ‘hood for nearly a century.
This is not some kind of soppy obituary designed to paint Margaret as a perfect person, not designed to make you think I was always the best neighbor I could be. I just want you to get a quick thumbnail image of Margaret in your mind.
First of all, her throne was the wrap-around porch of the big two-story 1906 home she and Frank kept immaculate all those years. She held court each evening when the weather was right, and folks came from miles around to sip some sweet tea and share gossip and laughter for a few minutes under Frank’s big ceiling fan.
Any evening you might see a parked police car, indicating some officers were sitting and chatting and catching up on street news. An occasional city council member or merchant or dogwalker or wanderer or priest might stop and smile and listen to Margaret’s very long, very detailed, and very accurate tales. And she remembered each and every person, if not by name, then certainly by physical description.
One other thing: Nobody ever said NO to Margaret and got away with it. She was a powerhouse persuader, and most of us just learned to give in and enjoy the ride. Frank never said NO to her, either. He would give her anything she ever wanted. And he loved every minute of it.
Margaret was a walking genealogy reference and historian—she could recite the names and addresses of each and every family who had lived in each and every house for a two-block radius over a seven-decade period. And she knew where the bodies were buried. She knew who was Catholic, who was Jewish, who was Heathen, who was kind, who was spirited, who was unkind. You could always run a character reference on someone you didn’t know.
And she was a great guardian of the ‘hood. At any hour of the day or night, she and Frank would chase ambulances and fire engines if they stopped nearby, always ready to help stressed-out people, always ready to fill in the details of the incident when you dropped by later.
This was Margaret’s neighborhood, and she felt safe and protected no matter what went on around her, because she remembered how safe and protected she had been as a little girl in the big house in the 1920′s and ’30′s. After all, she resided in the house for all but two of her 92 years and would never consider moving anywhere else.
Just the other afternoon, when Margaret’s daughter Becky walked across the yard to tell me her mom had gone away a few minutes earlier, still smiling, I felt the slam of a large dome dropping over the ‘hood. For a few moments, the dome retained all the laughter and fun we’d had over the decades, laughing and talking and eating all the wonderful sweets the Selmans kept on hand for guests, all the babies and grandbabies and great-grandbabies Margaret had bounced on her knee, all the time she’d come to our rescue and we to hers. Then, the dome lifted, no longer needed, since all the good times were permanently embedded in my own memories and the memories of everyone who ever spent time with her. Now we can carry her sweet smile and bawdy laughter with us as inspiration for how we will treat our own family and acquaintances.
Margaret and Frank were the models for what good neighbors can be.
And rather than wistfully rue their passing, it’s fitting that I carry their legacy forward and become a model neighbor myself. As difficult as that might be
(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed