Eggshells

My house sits proudly on the top of a steep hill. From the master bedroom I can look out the window and down the street and the happy eggshell colored suburb is laid out before me. My family has a pool. On hot blistering days when I'm standing in the master bedroom looking down the street and thinking prolific thoughts about my happy eggshell colored neighborhood I can see a stampede of children running to my house to swim. Across the street is a goofy family. The oldest daughter who lives there and I used to work together for her father at the Home Depot. We would stand at a booth and try to sign up customers for heating and air conditioning consultations. Our quota was 10 sign ups a week, we were lucky to get that a month. Two houses down from mine are the cousins of the girl I used to work with. They are a progressive family. The mom works and the dad is a stay at home dad. The youngest son in that family is about 10 years old and has seen more rated R movies then I have. Across the street from the cousins is the home of the jerk that hit my car and ran. I know it was him because I was parked in front of his driveway and the giant dent in my car had white streaks in it from presumably his white car. A little bit further down the road is a lady I used to work with. Her house is yellow, which is very edgy. When I'm walking around the neighborhood she doesn't say hi, I don't think she remembers we work together. The second to last house on the street is where two of my first piano students live. They never practiced, often skipped lessons, and one time one of them farted and blamed it on me. I stopped teaching them. The last house on the street is horrifying, absolutely beyond the shadow of a doubt horrifying. There dwell several convicted criminals. One of the convicts living there once beat up a guy so badly the guy's eyeball fell out of its socket and was only connected by a sinewy nerve ending. Another kid used to sit at street corners and shoot paintballs at the windshields of passing by cars with the intention of causing a car accident. The youngest daughter once broke into the high school with a group of friends. They spray painted all the lockers and defecated all over the principal's desk. But the worst of them living there is the gym teacher! She once got mad at me for running the mile slowly, and then proceeded to "teach" me how to run. From the master bedroom of my house I can look down on my neighbors and be reminded of all my happy memories of the eggshell colored neighborhood: standing at the Home Depot, teaching little flatulaters how to play piano, and praying feverishly that my eyeballs will remain in their sockets.