Lesson Learned

I have done a fair amount of complaining about the people who live across the street. The 14-year-old who lives there plays football in the street incessantly, bouncing it off of people's houses and cars, he sits out front late at night while talking loudly on his cell phone, and his language is awful. Every day, a van pulls up to the house, blares its horn until someone comes out, and then the driver and the passenger engage in an argument filled with curse words. Every. Day. And their dog poops on the sidewalk and they don't usually pick it up.

Anyway, last night I learned a lesson about judging people and that their actions don't always speak for what sort of people they are on the inside.

Around 630 last night, someone knocked on the door. It was one of the people across the street, and they had just witnessed someone backing their car into our van, then driving away. She had the plate number and a description of the car, as well as the house number of the hit-and-run driver, who lives several houses down from us. He definitely realized what he had done, because the neighbor saw him get out of his car, go into his house, then come back out and wipe his car off before driving away. When he came back, he went into the bar on the corner, and when some of the patrons told him, "You know you hit that car, "he responded with, "No big deal." John ended up calling the police, and the officer who responded looked at the damage, listened to the witness's account, then knocked on the guy's door. When asked why he didn't leave a note, the driver said, "there wasn't anyone around." Basically, he wasn't going to take responsibility for what he did since he thought no one had seen him do it. The officer got angry, and told him that it's Maryland law that if you hit a vehicle, to call the police or leave a note, and that if John wasn't being so nice about it, the officer could haul the driver down to the police station!

John got his information and is supposed to hear from a claims adjuster today.

Lots of people have accidentally bumped a car or opened a door a little too forcefully, and probably everyone has been pinned into a parking spot by someone who got too close and had to rest the door on the side of the other person's vehicle in order to get in. That's not what makes me so mad. What makes me mad is that this is no little ding in the paint, this is a big scrape and a big dent; plus he knew that he did it and tried to avoid taking responsibility for it because "there was no one around." In addition, he didn't apologize to John when confronted. Those two little words, "I'm sorry, " go a long way.

Thank goodness our neighbors and the people at the bar took the time to get the tag number and take notice of who the driver was. That's what I call being neighborly. I can put up with honking horns and a few F-words for that.

Lesson learned. I am forever humble.