Our Neighbors, Part 1

The Misers have lived in this old house for many moons - over twenty years, which is a pretty long time. Of course, Bee has only lived here for two years, but Sparky and I have been here for the long haul. As you can well imagine, our neighborhood has changed a lot over the years. Our neighbors have changed as well, for better or for worse - mostly for the better with a couple of notable exceptions. The one thing that has remained a constant in our neighborhood is the on going inane graffiti, scribbled in boldly colored spray paint from the one and only Mayberry Crazys, a gang of young thugs who live a few blocks away. They are muy loco. And muy annoying. They spray paint mostly their names: Spooky,  Lefty, Shadow, Puppet - I swear to god these are some of their nom de plumes. Our house was tagged once, and Sparky painted a smiley face over the initials and left it up for a bit before painting it out. If only  the lot of them were more creative we might be able to tolerate the graffit more, but unfortunately there is absolutely no artistic ability amongst them, it seems to be merely done to claim their territory. Much like a dog peeing on every tree in the park. As you can probably tell, Sparky and I hate graffiti. It is an eyesore to us, plain and simple. 

One of The Crazy's favorite canvases is the old, derelict garage that is situated kitty corner from us in the alley. While we were away in Yosemite, The Crazys got down and graffitied all over the neighborhood, and they hit the garage of course. In bright red letters. "Mayberry Crazys" it said in huge writing, and some other names that I've already forgotten. And the reason why I've forgotten what it said is because of this:  this wonderful guy (a good neighbor) who lives up the street painted it out this afternoon with some extra house paint he had. This is the second time he has done it, he hates graffiti as much as Sparky and I do, maybe even more. He admitted to me that he would like to spend the night hiding in the alley with a bb gun, and shoot at the punks once he caught them in the act. This may seem like a violent fantasy to some, but I could completely understand where he was coming from. Grafitti is an ugly urban reality that needs to go away. Sparky is usually the one who ends up painting out the ugly scrawl, but he is officially out of neutral colored house paint. That poor garage has been painted over so many times in so many different colors of paint, and it will most likely be painted over many more times in the future. Anyway, this good samatarian is fairly new to our neighborhood, and we could definitely use a few more like him around.