Our Neighbor Hermie

Hermie provides the neighborhood entertainment. He’s not aware of this. He thinks he's just a popular guy. He is. He’s popular because he’s always good for entertainment. Hermie causes the folks to sit out front instead of out back. Sit out back and you might miss something and only hear about it. That’s never as good as seeing or hearing it firsthand. It’s still good, just not as good.

We live in a nice, quiet neighborhood. It’s part of the city but not part of the city. It looks like Charleston but it isn’t. To our south is the main business area of Charleston. Malls and shopping centers and restaurants of all kinds. West and east is all residential. The north is a marsh. I no longer refer to it as a swamp or a stink hole. That offends people here. It’s true but they prefer to pretend it isn’t.

Walk in it and you get fluff mud on you, not slime. It’s, “the smell of nature”, not swamp gas. Smells the same as swamp gas, though.

I stood on my porch the other evening when I saw a couch coming down the street. It looked like a couch on wheels. I could see, barely, Hermie’s head sticking out from around one end. Then I could see that the couch was on the hood of his car. He pulled into his driveway and yard and stopped. As he got out, I had to go over. I had to know what this one was.

“Hey, Hermie, need a hand gettin’ the couch down?”, I asked.

“Why, yea, that’d be nice”, he answered.

The couch was heavy but we got it down okay. As we cleared the front of the car, Hermie let go. The couch hit the ground and I felt like I’d been hit. I set my end down as gently as I could. We stood there for a second when I asked Hermie, “Hermie, you had this couch on the hood. Why not the top or trunk? You didn’t even have it tied down”, I said.

“Huh? No need to tie ‘er down. This thing weighs a ton. It weren’t goin’ nowhere. You know about that pressure thing the smart guys are always talkin’ ‘bout. I figured that’d hold it on the car. Heavy as it is, I didn’t feel like liftin’ it up to the roof. Besides, it might dent the roof. The trunk, now I thought about that one. I decided not to ‘cause I wouldn’t be able to see behind me unless I craned my neck way around. This way I only had to stick my head out the window”.

Oh, okay, that makes sense.

Hermie got cited for a zoning violation for having a truck sitting in his backyard, on blocks. His solution was to move it to his front yard, on blocks. He got cited again.

“What am I supposed to do?”, he asked Old Lady Ravenal, his next-door neighbor.

“Well, Hermie, you could get it fixed, off those blocks and running”, she told him, hoping it would get running out of the neighborhood.

“Yea, guess I could”, he told her. It’s still there.

He got a big dog once. He told us all that it was being abused by it’s owner so he took it. The owner didn’t know he took it. He also told us the dog was a mean one so don’t try to pet it and don’t walk our little dogs too close to his yard. The dog howled at everything that moved, including the wind. We told Hermie, nicely, that this dog was a pain in the butt. Hermie just laughed until the dog bit him. Bit him a good one. Haven’t seen the dog since.

I’d hate to see Hermie move- sort of.