First, a little moral fable:

Jeda’s Tale

When we moved to the Berkeley hills six year ago, Jeda lived one house over, in the Clown House. We called it that because the residents wore garish outfits and went to Burning Man. They were acrobats and kalimba players and fire dancers. The neighbors weren’t happy about the situation, because these free spirits played music late into the night and brought a lot of old beaters and campervans to the area, occupying a good portion of our narrow, winding residential street. Eventually, the owners of the house returned, and all these colorful characters went to inhabit grayer pastures, Oakland art collectives and warehouse spaces in Richmond.
Jeda had an RV. An old model called a Windrunner, which was brown and cream and had those parallel grooves running across the body like those campers from the seventies will, to make them more aerodynamic perhaps. It was huge.
One evening, Jeda walked down Shasta Road as I was in the process of building a fence around the garden to keep the dogs from running off, and asked me if she could leave her camper in front of our house. I said “sure thing”—we only had one car in addition to the Mutt Mobile, which Lily refused to drive after the breaks went out on a winding mountain road going into Ukiah. Lily’s car was a Golf GTI, which didn’t take up a lot of space. So there was enough room for Jeda and her girlfriend to park their big camper in front of our patchy lawn. Although they spent most of their time at the Clown House, they always slept in the camper.

Four days later, she got a ticket. Neighbors had complained about a “stationary vehicle.” There’s a city ordinance (which people tend to ignore) that says cars cannot be parked more than 48 hours at a time on the street in any given location. So Jeda had to move her camper.
I had a few good talks with Jeda while she was parked in front of our house. She had beautiful aquiline features and expressive eyes that were either green or brown, depending on the angle of the light. She was perfectly bald because she had undergone chemotherapy. The cancer had receded and the tumor had become undetectable, but she had decided not to grow back her hair, just in case. We talked about this and that, little things mostly. Her body painting practice, and the other work she did, which was mostly agrarian. She was a picker, and tended vines in Napa. One day, Jeda came to our door to say good-bye. A vineyard owner somewhere was offering her a “good gig,” so she was leaving with her partner, Crow. She thanked me for the talks and the attempt to provide a parking space for the Windrunner. “You’re a good listener.” We hugged, and that was that.
A year later, after the clown house had been vacated and was in the process of being renovated, I found Jeda sitting on our front lawn. “What’s up?” she asked me. She sounded a little broody, but I didn’t think much about it. She had never been the chipper sort. Her Napa gig hadn’t worked out, and she had joined some kind of farm collective in Mendocino, and then broken up with Crow. She was on her way to San Antonio, where her father lived, and she wanted to come and pay her respects before leaving NorCal for good. I thought there was something a little strange about the whole situation, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. We’d never been friends, only neighbors. I didn’t dare to enquire about her health. So we chatted for a bit, and I asked her if she needed a place to sleep before hitting the road.
“Nope. My camper’s parked down the road. I want to get an early start.” She hesitated, then got up slowly. “I’ll be on my way then.”
“It was nice to see you Jeda” I chirped. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“Keep in touch.”
“Sure.” I didn’t ask her to write down her contact info although I knew I could probably never find the lavender Post-it she’d handed before leaving the hills. The truth was, why would I keep in touch? In this world, who has time for a struggling ex-neighbor? The answer, maybe, had something to do with the reason I found her on our lawn a year after our last encounter. We’d connected at one point, if fleetingly. Maybe her cancer had come back, or maybe she had lost her way and needed a friend. But I was preoccupied with all sorts of things—our baby daughter, the grinding commute to Santa Cruz for Lily’s PhD, our leaky little rental in the mountains, a hard assignment for National Geographic magazine. I didn’t have time for Jeda. When I think about it, it makes me want to cry. Sorry, Jeda.

 Copyright 2017 Noah Sudarsky.