02/09/01

A Letter to Our Neighbor . . . (no, we didn’t really give this to him)

Oh Mr. Neighbor, you who live below us, why do you carry on like a sophomore in college? Once or twice a week you drink your rakiya (I see the empty bottles outside your door) and invite all of your loud friends over to watch Slavi Triphonov (the Bulgarian equivalent of David Letterman). I hear you after one glass – you become slightly braver. After two, your words jet through our floor like an unwanted guest. After three, you whistle to your chalga music and attempt to sing the words you know, which reveals your drunkenness. After four, you begin to yell and lose all regard for your humble neighbors who have to work the next day. And we, who are trying to read, trying to sleep, trying to write, eat, or do anything in peace, are at your mercy. Why, oh why, do you torture us so? Sometimes we hear other neighbors pounding on the walls for you to be quiet and we have tried the same thing. But you just turn your music up louder and feed off of our attention of your stupidity. So what are we to do? Get angry? That’s an option, but that doesn’t do much. Follow my students’ advice? They told me to go downstairs and beat you up. Hmmmm . . . I’m sort of skinny and Kate’s not the violent type, so we don’t make a good “beating-up-team.” Pound on the floor more? Nope, that just makes you louder and makes me even angrier. Throw firecrackers from our porch down to your porch? That could work, but I think you might eventually find out that it’s us and then we’d just have to live around each other for another year-and-a-half. Hmmmmm . . .what should we do? I’ve got it! We’ll solve it like a Bulgarian. We’ll start talking about you to all of our neighbors. The word will begin to circulate and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll get some pressure from a person you have some fear of and he or she will tell you to cool it. I know you have no fear of us. One night, after we pounded on the floor, you simply took your radio and held it up to your ceiling to spite us.

Oh Mr. Neighbor, you hold us like hostages with your sophomoric ways. Perhaps you should visit a University campus and sow your wild oats there – and then perhaps you will come back with an education that will enlighten you and help you to understand the different people in the world. Or perhaps you just need to listen to your mother and learn the rules of politeness once again. I think you have forgotten those. Oh Mr. Neighbor, you give your country a bad name to people like us who are trying to live in your culture. Your brash and immature ways make your society seem cheap and shallow. To people who are not a part of your culture we experience everything here with a different eye and you have made it seem like you have no interest in the outside world. It seems your only desire is to inebriate yourself once or twice a week. That is your freedom and you drag everyone else down with it.

And now, even as I write this, I can tell you are on at least your fourth glass of rakiya. Your loud voice, over the blaring television, over your drunken friends, over the sound of occasional pounds on the walls from the other neighbors, has become like the sound of a dentist’s drill to me. A simple utterance from your mouth makes me tense up and wonder if I can sleep tonight and have a normal day tomorrow. So I close and beg of you to consider others and their needs as you indulge yourself in your pleasures. Think about how you will feel tomorrow morning – don’t you get sick of feeling that way? Perhaps you will some day and I hope that is soon.

Signed,

Looking for peace in Bulgaria