Let's go meet the neighbors!

This first appeared in the Albany Times-Union.

By Felix Carroll

Unlike the mass-produced batches of bombastic, blue-blotched cannonballs discharged each morning from the recoiling commercial ovens of your favorite supermarket, my wife's blueberry muffins impose themselves upon no one's personal space.

Sized to the dimensions of no more than four mouthfuls, their deliberate lack of excessive fervency pretty much mirrors the kind of people we are.

Therefore, to present a plateful of them to neighbors who just moved in two doors down in that charming little white house is to say in the silence of our hearts, "Welcome, friend! We baked these for you. They are moist and delicious for sure, but mostly they represent our willingness to care about you if you choose to be cared about by us. These muffins tell a little bit about ourselves. Mostly, we know about boundaries, and if we didn't, we would be presenting you with very large, store-bought muffins whose self possession has an edge of aggression.

"Dear neighbors, if you're finding this unannounced visit of neighborliness to be awkward or even annoying, please note we put the muffins on a paper plate rather than one you would have to wash and return. This is our way of saying that if you wish to never interact with us ever again other than a perfunctory wave you can simply throw the paper plate away, and we can all pretend this never happened."

Our new neighbors moved in June 5. We got a glimpse of them that Saturday, a young couple with a skip to their step. That's when the idea came to us to welcome them to the neighborhood the way people used to welcome people to neighborhoods. That is to say, knock on the door and present ourselves as smiling, potentially awesome neighbors bearing a gift.

Later that day, our house smelled like blueberry muffins. My wife made extra. We stuffed our faces. She put six on a paper plate and arranged them in a way that looked purposefully unarranged.

"Do you have to give them six?" I said, still chewing. "Why not four?"

"Because then the plate would look too empty."

Our 10-year-old boy piped in: "Then put the four on a smaller plate."

"Yeah," I said. "Four muffins on a smaller plate will still look like a plate full of muffins."

We didn't have a smaller paper plate. I put on a clean shirt. She poked a comb at her hair. We spit-shined our boy. Then we headed out the door, muffins in hand, out to the street when we noticed the neighbors' cars were gone.

"They were just there, like, 12 minutes ago," I said.

We went back into the house and appointed our boy the official scout. Every 20 minutes or so he would come back inside and shout, "Nope, not there."

The next morning, again they were there, then they were gone. Later that day, our mouths encroached upon their muffins, and thereby Operation Welcome to the Neighborhood was suspended.

Then, the following day, my wife made haste and baked another batch. Muffins in hand, our boy spit-shined, we again made our way out onto the street and discovered their cars were gone.

"They were just there 10 minutes ago," I said.

Over the course of the next two days, the same sort of there-then-not-there thing happened. We polished off their muffins and decided to regroup the next day. But then at 2:20 a.m. my pager went off. I'm a firefighter. We got a report of a carbon monoxide alarm in the home of our new neighbors. We pulled up in the fire engines seven minutes later. All was well. We shut off their boiler. We vented the house. And I introduced myself.

So that was that. I now give perfunctory waves to them when I pass by, and I haven't eaten a decent muffin in three weeks.