Ida

Joe ran into our neighbor Ida yesterday, on his way into our building after work. Ida serves on the condo board. She used to hate us — we could tell that from the moment we’d moved in, she’d pegged us as young, raucous whippersnappers, prone to fits of laughter that would echo through the hallways and loud parties at all hours of the night. Little did she know that Joe and I are both old souls, more content to don our respective PJs by 8:00 p.m., settle on the couch, and alternate watching our favorite Teds — Ted Bundy documentaries and Ted Lasso — while our cat snuggles in between us.

Ida is a lifelong Baltimorean — a light-skinned Black woman who has had the same helmet-like hairstyle since 1986, a slow, Southern drawl and pace to her speech, and exactly zero tolerance for “nonsense.” Once, about five years into our living in the building and her unfortunate prejudgment of our character, she’d given residents the bare minimum amount of notice that any items sitting outside of our assigned storage spaces would be thrown out, due to it being a fire hazard. I don’t know of anyone who’s been trapped in their building’s storage area and unable to leave in the event of a fire because another resident’s kid’s tricycle was blocking their exit, but there you have it.

By the time we’d received the notice and remembered the one item that we’d very temporarily placed in the area Ida was planning to clear, the action had already been taken — suddenly panicked, I ran upstairs to the storage area, to find the communal walkway between storage spaces spotless. Not a speck of debris in sight.

She’d thrown out all of my photos. Every single picture I’d collected over the course of my entire life, stored in a blue Rubbermaid bin that we’d decided was too much of an eyesore for our out-of-town guests to see during their short stay with us. Drawings my students had made for me when I was a teacher. Favorite family photos I’d surreptitiously sneaked out of my parents’ photo albums. All of the photos my dad had taken during my rowing years — he’d never missed a regatta. The scrapbook I’d put together throughout college, with the two pages of cringe-worthy photos taken the time my friends and I went to The Hangar Club, a male strip club, when I was 21. I still remember the thrill of “Silk” using his teeth to remove the dollar bill sticking out of the top of my favorite hot-pink shirt, a very early-2000s-style button-down from the Gap.

Because of her, rowing was gone. Cute drawings were gone. Aged, precious family photos — the ones printed on the smaller 3x5 paper with rounded corners — were gone. Silk was gone. (Probably for the best, in case I ever get famous — I would not want those getting out.) It was all gone. And I could picture Ida sitting in her ground-floor unit, a satisfied, vindicated smirk on her stupid face.

However, obedient codependent that I was, I quickly turned from hating Ida to blaming myself for being so arrogant and careless and lazy to break the rules like that. I deserved to lose those photos. I berated myself for weeks, and still have dull pangs of shame deep in my belly when I think of it to this day. I should’ve just left the bin of photos in our unit. Covered it with a blanket or something if I didn’t want people to see it. But because I was vain and wanted everything to be p-e-r-f-e-c-t, I had no more photos, only my spotty, gnat-like memory to rely upon.

Eventually, I learned to accept what had happened. My mom gave me a few family photos to start rebuilding my collection. Truth be told, I think the experience has helped me let go of a deep-seated desire to hold on to things. Joe and I aren’t having kids. I just turned 40. When Joe’s brother died suddenly, two years ago, within five days we’d cleaned out his London flat, reducing the vestiges of his existence to what would fit inside two suitcases.

I am acutely aware that, when we die, the vast majority of the stuff we own will be thrown out. It’s slightly more comforting to think that at least some of it might be donated, or passed on to someone who wants/needs it, but it’s only a shred of comfort. I don’t even know if a family member or someone we know will be the one to go through our things.

Losing that blue bin of memories shifted something in me. Ever so slowly, since that day, I’ve pivoted from someone who accumulates to someone who experiences. On any given day, I’ll choose a trip or a fancy meal over a piece of jewelry or the latest iPhone or even a new house. Don’t get me wrong — I still like things. I love shopping. But the things aren’t “me” anymore. The things are just things, at the end of the day. My house could burn down and I know I’ll be fine. Ida started that fire for me when she unceremoniously decapitated my memories.

Things have gotten better between Ida and us. When the board decided to repave the parking lot, and a group of residents started going door to door in protest, believing that the money could’ve been better used elsewhere, we overheard a verbal altercation she had with them in the atrium of our building.

“You’re not on the condo bawd!” she proclaimed in her peculiar intonation that’s somehow a mixture of both Baltimore and Savannah. “You don’t come to the meetins’! You don’t like it, you GET ON THE BAWD!”

That night, I taped a handwritten note on her door, telling her that Joe and I were supportive of the board and knew that they had our best interests at heart. If that doesn’t get her to like us, I thought, Then she’s a dried-up old ninny and she will officially be Dead To Me.

Ah, codependency.

She got our note, and from that moment forward, she’s liked us. She’s especially liked us since I helped remove a drug-dealing tenant from our building, using a patented and potent combination of cop-calling, window-spying, unit owner-emailing, condo covenants-reading, and security camera-reviewing. She and I can chat on the phone for a while now.

Rapport built. Neighborly neighboring achieved. I appreciate her; where she’s come from, what she’s trying to accomplish in her golden years. Who she is. When she really gets going, her laugh is infectious and her accent is thick — we may as well be sitting on a porch in rocking chairs, drinking sweet tea. I love it.

So now, when Joe or I pass her in the hall, we say hello. Exchange pleasantries. She tells us about the latest “nonsense” that’s bugging her. Lately, it’s been the color that they’re using to paint the stairs outside the buildings. (“It’s too light! It’ll be stained by mawnin’!”)

“How you doin’?” she asked Joe yesterday.

“Ah, you know. It’s been a long day,” he responded with a small-talk smile.

A pause from Ida. And then:

“Well. They don’t get any shawta.”

Damn, Ida. You could not be more right.