Easter is a time for giving, intentional or otherwise

Apr 20, 2007 11:42

The previous owners of our house were a Greek Orthodox priest and his wife. They seemed very nice (is what I would say if I was trying to be polite, because they were both crazy), but I'm pretty sure they weren't 100% stoked to sell their home to a couple of big homos. I don't know if the Greek Orthodox church has an official policy on homos, but if we examine the way these two members behaved towards us, we can assume it would be something like this:

"Homos are not cool. Unfortunately, homos are a necessary element in the modern real estate market. They have lots of disposable income, and they make decorating choices that increase property values. You can sell your house to them, but feel free to lie to them, stick them with unexpected expenses, and cause lots of trouble for them. And once the house is theirs, have nothing more to do with them. Stupid homos."

In effect, once they sold us their house (lies and all), they cut off all contact. They didn't give us a forwarding address of phone number, and they haven't been in touch once since we got the keys. Which is awesome for us, actually. We're happy to be rid of them. And it's not like they forgot to give us their new address, either. I mean, this is a woman who gave us a 15 year-old receipt for the fridge, in case we wanted to make a claim on the warranty. They follow through.

Not knowing where they went means that we get to mark all of their mail "return to sender." And they still get a lot of mail. It's surprisingly satisfying to know that some of their Christmas cards were returned to their friends marked "Moved -- Address unknown." "We've entered the witness protection program to finally get away from you. Feliz navidad, bitches."

But the highlight of this situation happened last week: I came home from work to find a plastic grocery bag hanging from our mailbox. It appeared to be full of food, and attached to that bag was a bag full of dinner rolls. Our green bin (for composting) sits right under our mailbox, and our next-door neighbour usually hangs her garbage from her mailbox a couple of feet away from ours (she's a classy lady). Naturally, I assumed she had no space on her own mailbox, and had hung her extra garbage on ours.

I went in the house hollering about how GROSS it was that our SKANK of a neighbour hung her GARBAGE on our freakin' MAILBOX, and how The Monk had to get OUTSIDE and deal with it, because there was NO WAY I could handle it right now, since I was SO GODDAMN MAD.

He went out to clean it up, and ended up bringing it inside. I was already screaming about how he had to get that nasty-ass garbage out of my house when I noticed the big grin on his face. He laughed as he told me what was going on:

"It's not garbage."
"What? Then what is it?"

He brought it through to the kitchen, and opened it up on the counter. Inside was a buffet of pastries, chocolates, spanakopita, cookies, all carefully wrapped and arranged on paper plates, and, of course, about 20 fresh dinner rolls.

It was clear that someone had dropped off this wealth of delights for the previous owners (as it was Greek Orthodox Easter that day), but there was no name or note on the bag. We each had a pastry in our mouth before we started to discuss the appropriate course of action.

"We don't have any options. We don't know who left it, and we don't know where the [previous owners] are." [Chew, chew, chew.]
"It's clear we have no options here. We have to eat it all ourselves." [Chew, chew, chew.]
"What are you eating? Is it as good as this?" [Chew, chew, chew.]
"One of these flaky, sugary things. It's delicious." [Chew, chew, chew.]
[Chew, chew ......]
"You realize that we're eating a bunch of food we found outside, right?"
[Chew ...... ]
"Yeah... That's... Okay with me!"
"Me, too!"
[Chew, chew, chew.]

Thanks, stranger. We really appreciate the gift. Except the white, doughy things. Those were kind of gross. Everything else was delicious, though. Happy Easter!
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