My Neighbor Jerry
When weather permits, Ole Jerry must spend at least a third of his waking hours planted in a chair on his porch. He has two chairs on his porch, but he only ever uses the one closest to his front door. He sits there in silence, day after day, utterly unoccupied for hours on end, always wearing the same light-blue denim button-up and black velcro sneakers, gazing across the street into a strip of Wissahickon Valley woods barely thick enough to conceal the traffic humming along Lincoln Drive across the creek. So far as I can tell, he has no wife, no family, no friends who come to visit, no pets of any sort. His truck is always — always — parked in the same place, and I’ve never seen him get into or out of it. Sometimes I wonder if Jerry ever ventures farther than the sidewalk in front of his house, a boundary I saw him nearly, but never quite, cross a few times this fall, the cord to his electric leaf blower like a leash keeping him from straying past the limits of his allotted portion of the planet. Surely Jerry knows there’s a creek snaking along the bottom of the ravine across the street. But when was the last time he walked along it? Anytime I leave or return to my apartment and he’s sitting there in his porch chair, which is often, I wave hello and he waves back. Sometimes we exchange brief greetings — how are you? Good. And you? Good. Alright, have a good one! You do the same — but never more.
Except for one time. One weekday, when I was leaving my apartment around noon, I saw Jerry sitting in the usual manner in his usual porch chair, and I gave him my usual: “how are you?” In return I was expecting his usual “good, and you?” But this time, Jerry replied:
“I woke up. That means it’s a good day.”
To which I replied, at first, with a soft laugh and a smile, and then: “I like that. That’s a good way to look at it.” And he said, “it’s the only way to look at it.”