Good deeds gone bad

I think we made a mistake. I'd like to place the blame solely on Kevin because it was his idea initially, but I thought it was a good idea initially. So we are both to blame.

I'll start from the beginning.

It was a Saturday morning, almost a Saturday afternoon. I was upstairs, slowly and leisurely waking myself up and about to get in the shower. Kevin was downstairs, about to make me some of his amazing pancakes. The doorbell rang. It was neighbor Joe.

"Is my friend Mandy here?" I heard him ask Kevin. I thought uncharitable thoughts while I quickly got dressed and went downstairs.

"Hey Joe!" I said, composed and all smiles.

He started to tell me about the food bank up the street, and that it's open every Saturday morning if I was interested.

"Not that you're poor or anything," he added. We were talking on my front porch; his smelly dog Penny was with him, pulling and sniffing and howling. I thanked him for telling me about the food bank, thinking that I wouldn't go there unless I absolutely had to, but appreciating the sentiment.

He shook my hand before he turned to go. He always shakes my hand, and I always wash them afterward. It's the dog. And he's kinda dirty.

I went back to the kitchen to help, no, supervise Kevin making pancakes. Just as we were going to sit down to eat them, the doorbell rang again. We knew who it was.

"If Penny's not with him, ask him if he wants to come in and have some pancakes," Kevin said. That would be nice, I thought.

Instead of Penny, Joe brought two bags of food he had gotten earlier from the food bank.

"I was going to take this back to the food bank," he said. "I don't use any of this stuff. I don't cook. But I thought maybe you might want it."

Odd, I thought, but it was a nice thought. There was spaghetti and pasta sauce and a big hunk of margarine and paper towels and devil's food cake mix and other odds and ends. Most of it we didn't need, but I ended up keeping some of it.

"Do you want to come in for pancakes? Kevin just made some," I said.

At first, he demurred. Then he thought a second and said, "Do you have bacon?"

"No, sorry. We don't really eat it," I said. He thought some more, apparently weighing his desire for bacon against his desire for company.

"Aw, sure, why not?" he said and shuffled into our house.

As I was holding the door open for him to pass, I realized that it was not his dog that I had been smelling all those times I ran into him on the street. It was him. I chose to ignore it.

He sat down at our table, I gave him some tea and pancakes and passed him the syrup. It was nice, really. He told us stories about his father and gambling and his former beagle, Billy. He told us he'd never gotten married because he didn't want a woman to interfere with his hunting and fishing habits. He told us about his family, how he was pretty much the last of them, that even his nieces and nephews had passed away before him. I felt sorry for him, but I was also hearing warning sirens in my head.

We sat there for about an hour, and when he'd talked himself out, he left. That's when Kevin told me Joe had peed on one of our dining room chairs that my mother had just recovered for me and that I had not gotten around to Scotchguarding yet.

I looked at the chair, a small, damp spot on the edge of it. At some point during his many stories, Joe had discreetly peed his pants. And it had leeched onto our chair.

I wish that was the worst of it.

After Kevin scrubbed the chair with upholstery cleaner and I moved it to a place where no one will ever sit, we found ourselves lounging in front of the TV, not really ready to do anything we had planned to do that day. An hour passed. I still hadn't showered.

Then, the doorbell. I looked at Kevin, he looked at me. I got up.

Joe was at our front door, this time with frozen bacon from his freezer and two fancy, but sticky jars of maple syrup. He wanted the jars back when we were done with them.

Then he asked for a ride to the Eat 'N Park diner up the street.

"I feel like some steak and mashed potatoes," he said. He didn't want me to sit and wait for him, just to drop him off.

This is what I'd feared when those sirens in my head were going off over pancakes. It was already happening, and it had only taken an hour. The anxiety must have showed on my face.

"If you can't do it now, I can take the train up," he said.

I had no excuse; I was just watching a movie on TV that I'd already seen and in fact owned the DVD. I already knew I was going to do it, but I didn't know how to let him know that just because I could do it now didn't mean I could cart him around whenever he wanted. All I could do was take him and hope that he'd understand by my hesitation that this was weird for me. I put on my flip-flops, and we got in the car.

As he struggled out of my low car at the Eat N Park parking lot, he said, "Even with that puss on, you're still elegant."

I felt bad. I didn't realize just how open a book my face was.

It wasn't just that I was afraid he'd pee in my car. It was the fear that I will somehow end up being responsible for him, that I'd have to take care of him or his dog if something ever happened. It was the fear that something will happen, and I won't be able to help. Or worse, completely unwilling to help. It was the guilt I know I'd feel later.

I like Joe, I really do. But I can't take care of him; I don't want to take care of him. And I don't want to feel obligated because he's so nice to us and gives us frozen bacon we may never eat.

I want to be a good neighbor and a good person and help the old man next door. But where's the line?

I'm afraid that by inviting him to cross our threshold, we have opened the flood gates. I'm afraid it makes me a bad person for kind of regretting it.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

We're lucky to have fantastic neighbors here in Pittsburgh. There's a mother-son duo on the right side of the house. Maureen is incredibly friendly, and so is her 20-something son, DJ. I don't get to talk to them as much as I'd like. They're in and out a lot, having jobs and all.

On the left side of the house, we have Joe, a deaf, 80-something man with his equally aging, but no less loud and smelly beagle, Penny. I see Joe and Penny a lot more.

Kevin introduced himself to Joe first. Joe was taking Penny for a short walk down the street to a grassy area next to the old folks home, where, he informed Kevin, "Penny likes to do her business." Joe also made sure to warn him about the poison ivy apparently growing across the street.

I met Joe a few days later, as Kevin and I were walking back from a dinner out to celebrate our first week in our new home. Joe was walking Penny again to her favorite pee spot. He warned me about the poison ivy, too.

"What's your name," Joe asked me.

"Mandy," I said.

Joe looked confused, almost angry. "What?" he said.

"Mandy!" I said, a little louder.

"Mandy!" Kevin said.

Joe still looked confused. I decided to change tactics.

"Amanda!" I said.

"Ben? Who's Ben?" Joe said.

Kevin and I looked at each other.

"You know what," Joe said. "I'm not gonna worry about it. You'll be around for a while, right?"

"Yes!" I said.

"OK then."

He walked away with Penny, who was eager to do her business after exhausting herself jumping all over Kevin and me. That was my first introduction to her smell.

I ran into Joe again a few days later. He stopped to talk to me. We tried again with my name, but it didn't work. Mandy was apparently too exotic for him to recognize. He didn't learn my name until he accidentally got a piece of our mail and saw it on the envelope. He came knocking at our door, he gave my mail to me, and we started talking.

He told me his right ear became deaf in the Navy. He was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a gun went off. He told me about his favorite spaghetti restaurant downtown and how Penny loves to eat spaghetti too. We talked about lots of things. Eventually, he left, but I felt less lonely.

A few days later, we ran into each other again.

"You know," he said. "You're something else."

I was a little wary. This could be bad.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"No matter how bad I'm feeling, when I see you smile, it always makes me feel better."

How do you not like somebody who says stuff like that, even if his dog does smell really, really bad.

He asked when I was getting married.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know!?"

"I don't! You'll have to ask Kevin."

Joe looked disgruntled. He said I shouldn't let Kevin take advantage of me, that if he didn't marry me soon, Joe would consider me fair game. "You tell him Joe said so," he said.

"I'll tell you what," he said on another occasion. "You wait until after the spring. Then we'll go to Kennywood. If you take me to Kennywood, I'll let you hold my hand."

On another occasion, he said, "We'll go get spaghetti at this place downtown. It's the best spaghetti in town."

A few days later, he gave me a stuffed lion. He said the lion would protect me. I was touched. I had to wash it because it smelled like Penny, but I was touched.

Then one day, he came over and gave me two paper towel rolls. He had bought one of the big economy size packages, and he figured "a woman can always use more paper towels. And these are the best kind." He uses them to clean up after Penny because she "dribbles." That explained the smell.

You just gotta love Joe.