Block Party

Once a year, the city allows people to stop auto traffic on their streets for a few hours in the evening so the neighborhood can enjoy a “block party”. In our neighborhood, everyone brings food and catches up with people you live near but see less than you’d imagine. It brings a feeling of community.

Inevitably there are people who violate the no-automobile rules. On one occasion, it was nearing the end of a perfect Seattle summer evening (warm, clear skies, and no rain), and all of the kids had gone to bed. Just a few adults remained, picking up the last of the chairs and folding tables. Dusk had fallen but the “Street Closed” signs remained in place at the ends of the block.

Headlights swept across the street as a car turned the corner at the end of the block. Normally, the driver sees the barricade (the sign) and turns around. This time, the car slowly drove around one side of it and approached us.

It was a large American car, circa 1973, and looked every bit its age. The paint was sun damaged, and a long crack ran across the windshield. As the car got closer, you could see that the car had no hubcaps and that much of the rubber gasketing around the windows had disintegrated. You could also see inside a small orange glow framed by the head of what appeared to be a hard-living woman in her sixties. She was smoking with the windows up.

As she approached the remaining adults, one of my neighbors who was putting away a card table scurried to the center of the street, blocking the car’s path and holding up his hand. He set the table on edge in front of him.

“Stop right there”, he said. “Didn’t you see the sign at the end of the street?”

The car slowed but continued to advance towards him. The driver began to slowly crank her window down and smoke poured out. However, she said nothing.

This neighbor has a tendency to get keyed up if he senses a rule is about to be violated, and this was no exception. He was itchin’ for a scrap, and it looked like he was about to get it.

“Don’t you know that you are breaking the law?”, he said, a little louder now, with a slight quaver in his voice (brought on not by fear but the adrenaline surge of getting to do one of his favorite things). By this time, the driver had rolled her window all the way down and cleared most of the smoke from the car interior. She wore a pair of fifties-style glasses with rhinestones and a reading-glasses chain to hang them around her generous neck.  She was within a foot of the table when she brought the car to a complete halt.

For what felt like an eternity, everything stopped, with the only sound the gentle rumble of the old car’s engine idling. The tension had risen and you almost see the hair on the back of my neighbor’s neck stand. Then, without warning, she spoke:

“Get out of the way!”, she rasped. “This is a street, you moron!”

For a moment, my neighbor was speechless – didn’t he already cover this in his opening remarks? Couldn’t she at least read his lips through the smoke and the cracked windshield as he explained that it was she, not he, who was in the wrong? He had the sign, he had the law, and he had the implicit approval of the remaining adults, not to mention law-abiding citizens everywhere.

“Did you not see the sign? Are you illiterate? Ignorance is no excuse for the law!” His voice was rising now, and the ruckus was causing lights to come on in previously dark homes. People appeared on their front porches to observe the spectacle.

“This is stupid!”, she yelled, and revved the engine. She then rolled, inch by inch, towards the table. The air now was so thick with tension that you could cut it with a knife, and when she finally touched the table the sound was so quiet so as to be anticlimactic.

“I’ve been hit!”, shouted my neighbor. Unimpressed, she replied in a gravelly voice, “You’re pathetic. Don’t you have something better to do?” She took a deep drag on her filterless mentholated cigarette and smoke billowed out her window.

My neighbor limped to the curb with his card table yelling, “I’m calling 911! You can’t just come over from Ballard and start breaking laws in Magnolia! This is an outrage! I have your license plate number and I will have you arrested for hit and run!”

Although he was slightly premature in his charge, she’d had enough, and (sort of following his suggestion) was on the move. She slowly proceeded to the other end of the block, and as she rounded the corner and turned down the hill, she shook her fist out the window.