The Neighbor Who Came For Breakfast

This clown of a neighbor woke me up with his yelling at 4:30am. It was all that I could do to stop myself from dragging the shotgun off of its pegs. In fact, I was rather well surprised that I did not cuss, swear, and carry on like the grumpy, awakened-too-early person that I was.

Where's that coffee?

About an hour later, up came the sun.

The noise outside the back door had not yet stopped. If anything, there was more noise than before. So I opened the door and looked out into the back yard. It was difficult to focus both eyes at the same time. It was too early for that. After some squinting and blinking, things more or less came into focus.

There was our neighbor. He was strutting around the yard like he owned the place. You could tell that the guy was looking for food. Yes, he looked both fit and fat, but it was easy enough to see that he was a greedy character with more and more food on his mind.

I yelled out to the guy.

"What in the world is wrong with you, Mister? You have a lot of nerve, Buddy, coming around here this early in the morning, running all around our back yard yelling your head off for more food? Get on back to your own place and awaken the rest of your bunch. Ask them to feed you. You dinghead. We don't even know your name."

Then I thought about what my bride had told me to do after our loyal and brave guard dog had up and died on us a while back. She had wisely told me to get another loyal and brave guard dog replacement for the good pup we had lost. Too late for that today, but I don't need any more of this 4:30am neighbor-yelling stuff. I suppose that I need to listen to my smart wife more carefully in the future.

More yelling out in the yard

It was a big mob of those noisy blue jay birds. Oh, were they ever raising sand out there. Seems as though they did not appreciate our wandering neighbor any more than did I.

On his part, he simply looked up into the tall Chinese tallow tree at the screaming blue jays. He laughed a little bit and wandered over toward the feeding station we had set up toward the back of the place. You could tell that this neighbor had a real case of the "attitudes."

It was difficult to tell this guy's age

He looked spry enough such that he might have been but a teenager. Yes. Teenagers tend to wander around where they are not supposed to wander, and they make more noise than steam boilers with cracks in the pipes. Sure enough, he might be one of the teenager type neighbors.

Then too, he could be an old guy, maybe even really old - like me. Old ones like me know how to fake it out. They probably do the same stuff that I do, particularly so when there are any pretty gals nearby and if our brides are not closely monitoring us.

He might have something I don't want to have myself

I don't want to get close enough to him to ask him his age. He might have something catching. Something that I can do without. Further, he looks like he could handle his own against a big, tough guy like me even though I know how to put on a face that would scare an elephant.

I considered the practicality of yelling back at him

"That's not the brightest idea over which you have ever broken those idea kinds of light bulbs," I reminded myself, "He may well be one of those illegal types who doesn't speak English"

We do have that problem around here where we live.

I thought of some more stuff to do toward the guy - anything to get him gone from our place. We have enough food to feed ourselves, but scarcely an extra piece of bread stays around here long enough to get it dry for crumbling so we can feed it to the little birdies and squirrels that befriend us.

While I was deep into those considerations, our noisy neighbor jumped to the top of the back fence. He was gone from the fence top in another instant. Guess where to -

To the yard on the greener grass side of the fence - that's where

Now, what I have to do is to figure out how to get him to stay on that side of the fence and do his yelling there at 4:30 o'clock of a morning.

Maybe I could just pray for rain and stormy weather. Praying is probably much easier and more effective than is trying to train a noisy and too-hungry neighbor.

Now, here's a note about the effectiveness of that praying stuff

It is now close to sundown around here. Guess who has returned for another noisy visit to our back yard. Right. It is our noisy neighbor again.

It is also pouring down rain at the moment, with some small hail mixed in. Plenty of thunder and lightning, too, with the wind blowing like crazy.

There he is, wandering around the back yard like he owns the place. If anything, he is noisier of an evening than he is at daybreak.