the Hieronymus Bosch painting that is my neighborhood

Crows pluck chicken bones from neighboring trash and retire to the trees in front of my house to pick the remaining flesh off them. Having removed the last specks of carrion, they rain them down onto the carpet of ground-cover below. This suburban food chain continues when my dogs wriggle free from the grasp of the front door and scramble to find these prize bones before I capture their tuck-tail butts and drag them back inside, crunching madly, trying to swallow before I can force the splintering prize from their jaws.

Next door the El Salvadorans have reverted to their old ways, storing up all manner of trash in their front yard while the city-provided bin goes unused. A child's mattress, crumpled happy meals, bits of this and that. At least there are no longer soiled diapers. Their children are older now. Time to call the authorities again to give them the hint that our customs are different here.

Across the street, where headless plaster geese peer through the cyclone fencing and the dead lawn looks like it contains the entire contents of a garage sale gone terribly wrong, a tiny bald Phillipino woman, newly widowed, lives with ghosts and demons. She is highly superstitious, (as are many Phillipinos according to one of my adult students, also a native, who remembers being told that demons would try to pull her down the toilet.)

Since her big gruff American husband dropped dead on a jaunt to Las Vegas a few months ago she has been afraid to be in the house. She wears mismatched clothes because she's afraid to go into their bedroom so she takes whatever is in the laundry and puts it on. She spends most of the day sorting through the jumbled mess in the trunk of her car so she doesn't have to face going inside. She's become a bag lady despite the real estate. Her sons and their families live up the street and drop by to check on her every day. She won't live with them. I don't know what will become of her.

Meanwhile the weeds grow, and the bag of golf clubs, dried up potted plants, fading plastic knickknacks, odd bricks and wire clothes hangers festoon the yard.

On the opposite corner lives the man I call Grumpy, and his long-suffering wife. He looks like Mr. Wilson from Dennis-the-Menace, only much, much older. Mr. Wilson's grandfather. He emerges from the house every Tuesday morning to put the trash out, wearing that charming precursor to the wife-beater, the undershirt. Sure it looked great when Clark Gable stripped down to it in a movie and caused a sensation, but seeing as how Grumpy is about the same age as Clark would be today, and several pounds heavier, he should not be seen in public that way.

His temperament has only two speeds; surly grumbling and obscenity-spewing rant. We've all learned to ignore him when he's on a roll, standing on the corner, shaking with rage, shouting fowl threats at those annoying buzz machines helmet-less neighborhood teens use to careen illegally around the streets here.

And yet this neighborhood is in California, on the Central Coast. Tropical plants grow outdoors here. It never snows. When the night is finally still I can hear the Pacific Ocean pounding into the shore, and if I get in the car I can be on a beach in less than five minutes. The worst house on this hellish street populated by bus boys and laborers (and this public school teacher) would sell for half a million dollars quickly. I could retire to a palace in the midwest. Yeah, I think about it often as I curse the noise and trash of my neighborhood, feeling trapped, surrounded by ignorance and filth. Just biding my time, checking out my options, paying off my mortgage.