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July 12, 2005

Stories from the 'hood: the kids are alright, but the animals are freakin' crazy

When we first moved to this town, we rented a cheap apartment in the second floor of a house, in what turned out to be the worst neighbourhood in town (east of the Casino). There's a lot of poverty there, a lot of substance abuse, a lot of chain link fencing around the front yards, garbage spilling into the street, and unhappy-looking, angry children with mean eyes who look like they might slash your tires just for driving by and disrupting their street hockey game. The guy downstairs was always drunk, always noisy and almost always fighting with somebody, often on his front porch (right under our bedroom window). In fact, our corner seemed to have some kind of magnetic attraction for angry people, or else there was something causing temporal-lobe stimulation that made people want to fight (maybe all the alcohol fumes and testosterone wafting out into the street from Louie's apartment below us). Many times we would lie in bed and hear people walking up the street, and when they got to our corner they would suddenly start fighting, then stop when they had walked past. One time it was a couple, talking normally until they were right in front of our house, then suddenly he was shouting "I'll rip your face off! I'll rip your fucking face off!" and she responded "rip my face off then! come on, rip my face off!". Then they crossed the street and resumed talking normally. No faces got ripped, as far as I know.

After two years there, we bought our house. Now we're on a charming, tree-lined street filled with young families, the children are happy and friendly* and nobody has chain link around their front yard or garbage on the sidewalk. It's only 8 blocks straight up the street from the old place, but it's like a different world. We're just on the edge of a pretentious little urban-professional neighbourhood (one of those neighbourhoods so pretentious that it insists on being referred to by its old town name it used to have before it became a part of the bigger city), and though it galls a girl with working-class roots like mine to admit it, we are part of the gentrification of this neighbourhood. However, since we're on the "wrong" side of W. street, our house cost us fifty thousand dollars less than people pay to live on the "right" side, and there are still quite a few rental houses owned by absentee landlords, and several crack houses in the next block over.

All of this is really just background to the story I wanted to tell about the crazy killer bird. But it's impossible for me to just tell a story, it's alway talk talk talk! around here, so deal with it. You should all be used to it by now.

So I was coming back from my walk out to the market and the yarn store (I got some black ribbon to finish Sexie--whee!) and when I came in my back gate the neighbour called me over to tell me that while she was on her back porch smoking a cigarette at 6:30 this morning, she stopped some guy from breaking into our van. She recognized the guy as someone who lives in or hangs around one of the crack houses around the corner (not that my neighbour goes to the crack house, she's just seen him around). These streets all have alleys running behind them and our parking is off the alley, and I'm sure that people's cars get broken into all the time back there. In fact our van was broken into back there once already, but we don't keep anything valuable in it; all they took were Peter's hockey sticks (only one was new, the rest very beat up) and our pop crate full of washer fluid and oil-soaked rags and a funnel. Very lucrative haul, there. My neighbour also said that a little while ago she saw someone break into the car of a house behind ours, and now they've installed a motion-sensor light out there. Maybe we'll get one too, but our stuff was stolen in broad daylight, while we ate our supper.

One more tangent, then I'll get to the story I meant to tell. Here is how much protection the residents of my neighbourhood can expect from the Windsor police: one afternoon about two months ago I was working at the computer and looked out the back window to see three men standing in our parking lot (there's a concrete slab at the back of our lot that stretches across the width of the property). They had bicycles and backpacks, and were looking over the fence into my yard and the yard next door. Then they started digging in their backpacks and pulled out some bottles of beer and started drinking it, and I noticed that one of them was wearing white gloves. So I called the Windsor police non-emergency line, explained the situation, and was told to call back if they did anything. I said, they are drinking beer on my property. They are sizing up the back of my house. They are WEARING WHITE GLOVES. Then they rode away. The lady said "call us if they come back". Why, so you can do nothing? Next time I'll go out there and take their picture and publish it on my website so when they do break into my house, well, I don't know what. I'll have their picture, anyway.

While I was in the back yard talking to my neighbour about all of this there was a sudden ruckus from the crowd of house sparrows who've taken up residence at our place ever since the mulberries started to ripen. They were shouting their heads off and swarming around a larger bird (the size of a starling, but it seemed to be solid black; my neighbour thought maybe it was a crow but if so it must have been awfully young). The black bird came out of the mulberry tree and landed on the sidewalk, and we could see then that it was attacking a smaller bird, and the other birds were flapping and shrieking, all in a tizzy. Then they all retreated and the black bird flopped and pecked around a bit then stopped and stood there looking down at what it had done. A neighbour cat who had been watching with interest from next door crept across my parking lot and under the gate, scaring the black bird back to the tree, where it did a kind of frenzied dance, gaping its beak but not making any sound. To my dismay, the cat did not avail itself of the fresh and free meal, and I had to go over and clean up the dead sparrow. The entire back of its head had been smashed in.

I don't think this is normal behaviour for crows. Is it for starlings? Is there some kind of bird gang warfare going on in my back yard (and if I cut down the mulberry tree, will it stop)? I hope it wasn't a zombie bird, bent on eating bird brains. Because I don't want that sparrow to become undead in my garbage can. Ew.

*The other day when I was on the front porch taking pictures of my shrink plastic, about half a dozen neighbour kids came up on the porch to bug assist me. The 3 kids across the street had just been running up and down the block calling for their dog and I had heard the older sister say "she jumped out my bedroom window". So I asked A., the younger sister, "your dog ran off?". She said nah, we found her hiding in the house. I said that fat boy does that all the time, I'll think he's run outside and then find him cowering in the basement. J., the ten-year-old from up the street, rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed, "Animals these days!".

Heh. Animals these days don't know how easy they have it. Why, when my dog was your age, he had to walk six kilometres barefoot in the snow twice a day to bring me my slippers. Uphill both ways, even.

Posted by jodi at July 12, 2005 03:40 PM | categories:  general

Comments

Posted by: Norma at July 12, 2005 08:06 PM

Posted by: sarah irene at July 12, 2005 08:47 PM

Posted by: Liz at July 13, 2005 12:00 PM

Posted by: NWJR at July 14, 2005 12:37 PM