Bamboozled

I’ve lived next door to Bert for going on five years now. Bert is a short, middle aged carpenter who wears circular spectacles and can almost always be found working in his backyard. I remember when Bert’s wife nearly called the police on my brother. He had stopped by to return the stepladder that my dad borrowed from Bert earlier that week. “What do you want?!” his wife said in a panicked voice from behind the closed door. “Uh…I’m just returning your ladder,” my brother replied. There was a pause before the front door opened slightly. “Oooooh!” she said emerging from behind the door with a toothy grin plastered on her face. “You’re Reggie’s son! You know, I just looked out and didn’t recognize you.” By this point she was laughing and slapping her neck with her right hand. “Bert’s not here and one can never be too cautious nowadays!” “Of course,” my brother retorted. What she really meant to say was, “Ooooh! I looked out and saw a black man and thought that you wanted to rob me!”

This morning my dad woke up at 7:30 am and found an email from Bert sitting in his inbox. In the email, Bert chatted on and on about his new dog, his summer vacation plans, work, and the lovely weather that we’ve been having. After all of the fluff, Bert got straight to the point. “By the way,” he wrote, “if it’s not any trouble, I am planning on building a fence that’s going to extend over a portion of your yard.” This “portion” to which Bert referred would have reduced the width of our backyard by nearly five feet. My dad responded to let Bert know that he plans on building a garage with trees along the driveway leading up to it, and so we’ll need to keep all of our land space. As 7:55am approached, Dad drafted the remainder of the email before bustling out the door to take Rachel and Jessi to school.

Dad pulled back into the driveway at minutes to 8 o’clock and noticed Bert digging holes in our yard for his fence posts. Dad ran into the house and up the stairs to get the yard measurements before confronting Bert. From the window I saw Dad talking to Bert who stared at my dad stoically over his round spectacles. Bert’s hands rested upon his portly hips as his feet pointed in opposite directions as if his right and left toes had had a disagreement and wanted nothing to do with one another.

As Dad turned to walk back into the house, Bert pulled out a measuring tape and began to measure the distance from our fence to where his backyard began. Dad entered the house a bit flustered. “He sent me that email at 7:30 and was out there diggin’ by 7:45!” Dad replied. “When he asked me for part of our backyard I thought of Chaka zulu,” he continued. Chaka zulu was one of history’s greatest African kings. When whites asked for a portion of his land, Chaka zulu went against his wife’s admonitions and allowed them to remain in his territory. The rest is history…