Salvage

The view from our home office includes the bottle depot, a rundown old apartment building, the abandoned Golden Harvest Movie Theatre aka Wings Bar, and at the end of the cul de sac is the salvage op.

This is when you look past the skinny empty lot which is already home to a couple of guys this season (one of whom is Len - and judging from the shape of Len's nose, I'd say he's not the winner of most of his bar fights).

Today Richard stopped by to drop off the beautiful boxes which had housed the Dom Perignon and Veuve Clicquot he and Tracy had used to celebrate special occasions. We're probably the only house on the street that starts with the empties!

Richard looked up the street, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

"It's the salvage yard," I said. "Overflowing. Been like that for a few months."

"That's not right," he said. "You should be able to call the city and have that cleaned up."

I love Richard. He's smart, cute as a button, and has lovely manners. He can also be, by his own admission, naive.

I didn't tell him about Wayne stealing our aluminum ladder - about how you can't leave anything metal in your yard or it's likely to be taken to the scrapyard for a few pennies. It's convenient to have the scrapyard there - a trip to the yard can be combined with a trip to the bottle depot. Now that Wings is closed, and the Camelot Sports Bar, there are fewer local bars to spend the money, but these guys tend to buy Finesse pump hairspray at the minimart and drink it.

Not Len, so far. but he looks like he's headed in that direction. He's still enough in the world that he wants to see under the hood of our Jaguar. And he's taken it upon himself to kick out would-be squatters. Yay Len!

This whole neighbourhood is a salvage yard. And in the summer, this is what happens. The people overflow. They lie about in every empty lot, sometimes just soaking in the sun, other times too blotto to know where they are. There are fights.

One of my neighbours two blocks north told me she was hearing a party of hard drinkers in the lot next door to her house. She went out and told them she had a young boy in the house, and she didn't really like her boy having to see this. You know what happened?

This is why I love this neighbourhood.

The men politely apologized, right away, and packed up.

Just because it looks bad, and tumbles out into the streets, doesn't mean the castaway stuff - be it metal or people - has no value or understands no values.