Neighborhood characters #3: The Nightwatchman

When you've got a construction project going on in our neighborhood, you're bound to attract some attention. Like moths to a flame, they come to weigh in. We are rich in unsolicited advice.

My heroic husband has been building a garage, and with the exception of some invaluable help from intrepid visiting family in June, he's been a one-man garage-building machine out there. He even saved $140 by not having the lumber yard deliver the gigantic plywood sheets to the roof of the garage with a boom, opting instead to do it himself.


By the way I figure it, he probably will have consumed the equivalent in Advil to soothe the back pains caused by single-handedly heaving 4x8 sheets of plywood to the top of the ladder, but who am I to say... And after all that, the poor guy is now on the disabled list: not from being crushed under a pile of plywood, but from a probable broken toe from stubbing it on the dang couch. The injustice of it all.

So we're out in the alley, admiring the progress--all construction projects must have a certain amount of standing back and admiring the progress--when up waddles one of our neighbors, a guy I'll call The Nightwatchman. The Nightwatchman is a pudgy, soft man with a unnervingly vacant look in his eye, a perpetually slightly perplexed look on his face, and a speech mannerism somewhere between a lisp and a guy trying to say the alphabet with a mouth full of saltines. He has two uniforms: by day, he's most commonly seen in a dirtly sleeveless man's undershirt and khaki pants, belted tightly around the middle so that he squishes out on both sides. By night, he's a security guard somewhere, so he changes to a more formal uniform with squeaky shoes and a badge, and drives off in the family's brown mini-van.

So The Nightwatchman wanders up, and we go through the usual whole routine with my husband--what's your name again, oh that's right, it rhymes with Santa Claus (not really, but whatever works.) He gets the details on the garage progress, gives his approval, and after a blessedly short interlude, makes off to provide some high security for something somewhere. As this is a guy who, I learned after a previous conversation, only made it to the 3rd grade after attacking his teacher with a chair, I've always been a little curious to know what kind of security detail he's on. But not quite enough to ask.

Anyway, it turns out that The Nightwatchman may be selling his share in his house and moving to Alabama--his family owns some land out there, apparently--so perhaps we won't be seeing him around quite so much. But until then, I guess our alley will continue to be exceptionally well patrolled.