Yesterday's blog was written when I was feeling a bit depressed, admittedly. Things have not been going very well these last few weeks, and perhaps the frustrations that I've been feeling were betrayed, and spilled out a bit in my writings.
I started writing that piece without knowing exactly what I was going to write about. I was tired, and not entirely well focused. Not at all confident about what I'd write about and, admittedly, not very confident that whatever it as that I would write would be of even halfway decent quality.
Yet, when I started getting going, it started to feel like a more and more meaningful piece. There has been an episode with someone who really is an insignificant aspect of my life usually, someone that was more or less just a background person, for the most part. If my present life was a movie, this guy (and his bitchy wife) most likely would not have even necessarily qualified as extras. But, unfortunately, they recently took on a much more prominent role - although they tried to hide it.
That was sneaky. Devious and underhanded, to be sure. Also, unexpected, on my end.
I will not say that I particularly liked these people. In fact, I actually rather had a distaste for them, but it was more at a distance. Now, I understand quite a bit more with them, and know to be on my guard with them, and never to trust them.
They reminded me of neighbors that my family had when we were younger. Neighbors who, for whatever the reason, took a disliking towards us and, instead of just leaving it at that, decided to try and force our family out by interfering in our business and doing small, petty things as displays of their dislike.
When I was growing up, my parents tended to bounce around quite a bit, from one place to the other. My mother is American, and my father is French. How they met might be a nice story for this blog, sometime, actually. But that is for another time.
In any case, we moved around a lot. At least we did early on in my life, and a bit before I was born. They met in the late 1960's here in the United States, and then moved to France, where they had my brother. They moved back to the United States for a few years, to the Bronx, where they had me. Then the family moved back to France for four years, roughly, before moving back to the United States on a more permanent level.
At first, they moved us to Liberty, New York - to the home of my mother's parents, or my grandparents. That lasted for about a year, and then they managed to find a place in Lodi, New Jersey. We stayed there for a couple of years, and that was where I attended school for first and second grade. My brother was a couple of grade ahead of me, but he had some tough friends that tended to be trouble makers. My parents had begun to worry about the company that he kept, and assumed that I might be the same, if we stayed in town. Lodi was a bit tougher then than it seems now, perhaps.
So, they saved up their money for a few years. My mom commuted to the city everyday, which was already a tiring But she did what she had to do, and the commute to the big city from suburban Lodi was perhaps not too bad. She was fairly young then, to boot.
My father, in the meantime, had started his own business. He was a house painter and, despite not speaking many words of English, he slowly built the business up. I still remember the motto that he used: A Touch of France in Your Home. It was usually just him, and the only help that he ever got was when he had my brother and/or I work alongside of him -with generous wages, I must say. That would come later on, though.
He knew what he was doing, too. He painted, sure. But he did it right, with primer, then first and second coats. He also knew how to do wallpapering, which is a skill that is significantly more difficult than painting. He had gone to school in France for that, dropping out of regular school. In Europe, in general, there are specialty schools for such trades, although most people here in the United States assumed that it was something that anyone could do, and usually, they tried to pay him with this assumption in mind. He later expressed some measure of regret at having chosen painting, in particular. But that, too, is another story for some other time.
In any case, they worked hard and saved up some money. Eventually, they could entertain the possibility of moving somewhere new, and looked around. One of the places they visited was a very quiet, borderline rural town in northwestern New Jersey. It was a small starter house, and they were impressed with the surrounding area, which was studded with wooded foothills. The whole place felt more country, more healthy. It seemed like a more promising place to raise their children, and that meant my brother and myself. They decided to give it a shot.
I even vaguely remember the first time that we visited the house, I think. I ran out of the car, and remember being impressed by a neighbor's flower bed, of sorts. The house is on a hill, and I remember that, kind of vaguely. These are memories that now go back decades (hate to admit that, but there you have it).
So, it seemed promising. A new life awaited us, new opportunities. But there were some complications.
First of all, the French family wanted to visit the United States. At first, it was supposed to be a couple of people. As it turned out, it was eight people, and they came almost all at once, en masse. It was too much, and forced my brother and I out pretty much right away for that summer. We stayed at my grandparent's place instead, while the French family stayed in what would be our room. I cannot say for sure, but I strongly suspect that this must have been the real beginning of the problems that we had with the neighbors.
Which brings me the second problem, of course. It was also the most serious problem: the specifics of the problems with the neighbors. There were tensions of some sort, although I was too young to notice or really pay attention to that sort of stuff. But on some level, I understood.
When summer melted away to fall, my brother and I went to school. Things went along normally, and then came the winter. Specifically, there was an enormous snow storm like no other one that I have seen in my lifetime. In a matter of hours, there were two to three feet of snow on the ground, in a single afternoon. My brother and I were home from school, but my mom was in the city, and my father was working. They both got caught in the storm. My father picked my mom up, and they drive home, but it took a very long time, understandably. By the time that they got home, it was something like 9pm. Our neighbors, now seemingly enemies, reported that my brother and I had been left alone for hours during the snow storm, and my parents were forced to spend money to get us a babysitter. It was the first of many such episodes, where they would take actions against our family, almost always entirely unwarranted. There are ways of approaching people, certain standards of decency and understanding. In such unusual circumstances, there could have been more understanding, and certainly better ways of dealing with such a situation. But all that these neighbors saw was an opportunity to hurt our family, with what seems to have been a desire to see us go, to not make it, and to give up and move.
My parents still live there to this day. After decades of hostility underneath the surface, these neighbors finally have begun to warm a little now to the family. All it took was thirty years, or so.
I do not want to get into the details of what these people in my present life, who truly had remained exclusively in the background up until very recently, did. But I know that there are ways of doing things without making a point of disrupting people's lives. They have a history of being like that, i discovered recently, so I know that they are more than capable of such petty actions.
In any case, I guess I just needed to vent out my frustrations, and did so in my writings - both yesterday and today. There is still some work that I need to do to remedy this, but that is for me to worry about. It comes at a particularly bad time in some other respects, as well, because a lot has been going on in my life. A little too much all at once. That is why I expressed that sentiment about how sometimes, it feels that you are all alone, and everywhere you look, all you can see are problems lining up to take their best shot at you, try and knock you down. Perhaps these are the hidden tests in life, to prove your own worth, your character. I hope that I pass mine, but we shall see soon enough, one way or the other.
All of that said, I have some awesome and supportive people in my life, and that is something that I am not blind to, or unappreciative of. In fact, it is a huge help to have that, and not feel so all alone at times like these.
These have been stressful times, the last few weeks. I have made some mistakes, and of course, I have to won up to that. There are things that I need to do, and I will have to figure out exactly what my approach will be. Two things in particular that are very important should come to a head by mid-September, two weeks or so away. After that, things will hopefully calm down, and I will be able to breathe a bit easier.
So, let's see what happens. But I am thankful again for those wonderful people in my life - including my family, my son, Sebastien, and my girlfriend, Basia. Your presence and support is most certainly appreciated!
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