Last night at 10:30 while I was home alone (well, with my dogs), a complete stranger, that I don’t ever remember seeing before came to my door.  I was very tired after 15 miles of hiking and at least 5 hours of driving and I wasn’t very excited about going to the door, let alone opening it.

I did have to open the door slightly to hear with this guy was saying, my dogs barking at the opening.  He said that my husband knew him and asked to speak with him. I told him to come back, he said that it was an emergency. I told him that I couldn’t help him out.

Pretty much everybody that I know in the bay area has had an experience similar to this.  It is certainly a somewhat regular occurance on our block.  We have spoken with several of our neighbors about this happening. Some of them absolutely hate it and do not give out money. Others, like us, use their judgement about the situation and very often do.

I found out later that J- actually did know this guy and had given him money last week.  I was a bit mad at J- to hear this because I generally don’t like to give money to strangers and I especially don’t like to bring any special attention to our home.

J- did give him something. In addition to that specific money, he also gave him an opening, a flow.  Now, I have taken something away.  And if he approaches J- again, and J- says no, it will be clearly a turn to the negative.

I know, I know, I am probably waaay overanalyzing this.

On the other hand, we do have neighbors that we know and trust. They are very kind to us and have nice kids.  The mom in the family, K-, regularly approaches us for money for asthma inhalers, birthday cakes, to get the dog out of the pound, etc.  We always give something and they often write us thank you cards.

At some point, we started calling it the K- tax.  They have lived here a whole lot longer than we have and we trust them to have our best interest in mind. We were watching the Sopranos at the time and we decided that they were kind of like a really nice mob. I can’t imagine feeling in danger of them, but I also wouldn’t like to be on their bad side.