Biography: My Neighbor, Mr. John

Tell a story about a neighbor, either someone who is your neighbor now, or someone who lived in your neighborhood in the past.

8015 Admiralty Place, Frederick MD 21701. That's not my address anymore, but feel free to pull it up on google maps for some context if you want. If you drop into street view, the truck in the driveway is actually the one I got to bring out to OU this year! My family moved here when I was two years old and my mom was about ready to burst with my younger brother. We moved to the house we're in now in October of 2012. Our next door neighbors for most of that time was an elderly couple with grandsons around my brother's age. Mr. John was the sweetest man with a bit of a mischievous streak. He gave me guitar lessons when I decided I wanted to play in third grade, but also pulled out his "potato gun" on a regular basis over the summers.

This "potato gun" was a couple pieces of pvc pipe hooked up to an air compressor that all the kids on the street loved. There's just something about launching a potato 60 yards that drives 8 year olds crazy! One of the most memorable adventure with him actually didn't involve him at all.

For Halloween one year (somewhere around 2008) we were over at a family friend's house to celebrate. My father thought it would be a brilliant idea to buy way too much dry ice to play with. Aside from putting it in the bottom of the pumpkin to create fog, one of the popular things to do at the time was to drop a piece in the bottom of a plastic water bottle with a little bit of warm water, screw on the top, throw it, and wait. No one else? Yeah, I kinda figured. My family is... interesting. I would to note, before we go further, that this all happened in the middle of a bunch of farmland and no one was ever in danger. Well, except for the dumbass (drunk) adults who were choosing to participate. I was like 9, I didn't really have much influence.

Anyways, there's a group of like four families all taking turns letting the dads rig this up and try to blow their fingers off. We kids just thought it was the coolest thing because it made a loud boom.

My family got back really late that night, just like every night we went over to the Danilko's, and woke up to a newspaper article taped to our screen door. Mr. John had stopped by early that morning with the front page of the paper. The headliner? Frederick residents arrested for dry ice "bomb making". We still laugh about it all the time. Mr. John and Mrs. Diana have since moved to Georgia to be closer to their kids, but I miss them dearly and hope they're doing well.

Author's Note: I promise I tried to find the article, but the newspaper it was published in went under a few years ago. There are lots of stories I could tell about my childhood home, but when I saw the neighbor prompt this is the one that immediately popped into my head. I'll leave you all with a picture of their Yorkie I pulled off of facebook:

The Henry's Yorkie, her name is Libby (via Facebook)