Love Thy Neighbor

I had been looking for a location for my new clinic for months; but everything the realtor showed me was either too big or too small or needed expensive tenant improvements. And there never seemed to be enough parking. So when I drove out of the alley which serves my CPA’s office one sunny afternoon in October of 2019, I was pleasantly surprised to see a For Rent sign in front of this small, neat as a pin, newly painted house. It was within a mile of my previous location. It had been repurposed as an office with newly updated floors and paint. And the price was right! The icing on the cake was the six glorious parking spaces to the side of the building. Six!  Providence, I concluded, had brought me here. This was the place I was to unleash my vision.

Those six parking spaces that I was so ecstatic about in the beginning have become the bane of my existence.

Parking spaces collect leaves and sticks and debris from wind-blown trees. They collect garbage from passersby and neighbors, like cigarette butts and empty soda cans and fast-food wrappers. And when you are running a wellness clinic, you hardly want cigarette butts and soda cans littering your parking lot. So you clean it up.

And then there are people who park in the parking spaces who don’t belong there. In the handicapped parking space, no less. I called the landlord. He retained a towing company and posted a bigger PARKING FOR CLIENTS ONLY sign.

I really want to be a good neighbor. I truly don’t mind folks parking after hours or on the weekends. But shooing people out of the parking lot day after day so my clients can park there gets old.  At first, I knocked on their door, introducing myself, and politely asked my neighbors  to move their cars.  Over the ensuing months I had many pleasant conversations regarding their parking habits, and their trash, always ending with them saying how sorry they were and agreeing to be more careful.

Of late, I just call the towing company.

Last Friday, I was aghast to find a big pile of dog poop at the end the fourth parking space. I sat in my car, staring at it, feeling shat on. I couldn’t prove it was my neighbor, but it felt better blaming them.

I left the dog poop there. Instead, I parked in the third stall, to hide it from view.

It’s bad enough I have to clean up my neighbor’s trash, now I have to clean up their dog poop? It’s bad enough having to pick up after my own dogs; I’ll be dog nabbed if I am going to pick up after someone else’s.   It sat there all day and stared back at me, scoffing, as I left that evening.

Saturday morning, Kenny and I ran errands. I wanted to drop by the office to pick up the mail. And when we pulled up there sat the pile. I had the brilliant idea of Kenny running over it with his wide truck tires. Spread it all out, I thought. Maybe it would rain hard enough to eventually make it go away.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, as I popped inside to gather the mail.

When I came out, the pile was gone.  My husband had grabbed a shovel from the bed, scooped the pile, and got rid of it altogether.

Some moments in life hit you like a ton of bricks.

Kenny’s humble gesture was a picture of redemption. Redemption from the wrong done to me. And If I could accept this gift, I could let it go.

That’s what I want to show the people I work with at Oregon Weight and Wellness who find themselves stuck. Stuck in destructive eating patterns, stuck in a sense of failure, stuck in shame and guilt. Because sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the stuckness stems from the pain of wrongs done to us and we use food to cover that up. At OWW, we want to come along side with grace and time, and humbly recognize that. We know we can’t right wrongs, but maybe there is a way to let it go and figure out a way forward.