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[ 8 minute read - 1771 words at 220 wpm ]

My Neighbour's Cat

My neighbour's cat recognises the sound of my neighbour's car and goes to it when my neighbour parks. It also seems to know the time as well. During the week my neighbour, Sally, gets home around about 5pm. At the weekends Sally doesn't come home until after, I think, 7pm. 

One of my problems is that if people do not stick to a plan, I can get quite irritated. Hyper-vigilance can also be a problem too, even though I have previously described it as a super-power.

This year, due to the dry Summer, I successfully avoided blight on my tomato plants and ended up with a lot of tomatoes. Because I give most of my plants away, I end up growing between five and twelve plants, but, I am not very good at growing them because I don't REALLY know what I am doing and I am lazy. The laziness is the worst part and the most devastating to the plants. 

To me, tomato plants are an expensive plant. I also grow strawberry plants. There is a difference here that makes strawberry plants cheap to me. Tomato plants in the UK are annuals; they die at the end of Autumn if they are indeterminates or once they have produced a flourish of fruit if they are determinates. Strawberry plants are perennials. They seem to be able to survive really quite harsh conditions. They also produce runners for new plants to grow from the 'mother' plant. I can experiment with strawberry plants. I cannot experiment with tomato plants. That is why I am rubbish at getting even a small crop each year. Quite simply, I don't learn. I use an artists brush to help to pollinate them, but I never thin out the leaves, like you are supposed to. I don't trust the weather. If I wound the plants today, it will be wet and warm for the next ten days and they would get blight, so I don't wound them by 'pinching out' new growth and old leaves. Removing old leaves and allowing air to freely circulate around the plant reduces the chance of 'blight', a fungus that affects all the Solanum family, including potato and Pepper plants (perennial, believe it or not). 

What am I getting at? In order to have 'hope' for a good yield, I use my laziness and uncertainty to ignore the need for practical work. If I put no effort in I will be less disappointed if the crop fails. In other words, I fail to put effort into my life. Bit of a large leap, you might think; jumping from ignoring responsibilities brought on by myself to cheating myself of a fulfilling life? I suppose, if I made of list of things I like to do and focused only on the top five at the expense of the lower five, we might consider that to be fine; as long as I still co-operate with my environment and attendant responsibilities, right? By environment, I mean normal existence in the UK and local conventions. 

The thing is, I do put a lot of effort into growing tomato plants. They attain a value greater than any other plant I grow in the 'doing' of growing them. But then, I just kind of forget them once they are big. This translates as I put a lot of effort into bringing something into maturity and then fail to maintain it.

I have a surplus of tomatoes this year, so, yesterday, I left some in an egg box outside Sally's door, about nine of them from different varieties.

Sally's cat was in the garden waiting for Sally to get home at tea-time, but the cat doesn't know about weekends. My hyper-vigilance had noticed another neighbour coming out of Sally's front garden, a couple of days ago. This neighbour feeds Sally's cat when Sally is on holiday. Normally, the cat sprawls in the front gardens, you know, all relaxed and large. Before 4pm it did this. I kept looking out of the window to see if I could see Sally's car. I probably looked three times between 3pm and 6pm. The tomatoes on her doorstep are valuable to me, and if Sally is on holiday I should retrieve them and eat them myself. For some reason, I felt that I still owned the tomatoes until she took them inside. Weird. 

The cat got up and went to where Sally usually parks on the road, to check it had not missed her arrival. It then walked up and down the road. I never see it do that; she avoids the other cats in our road. Eventually, it settled on walking the outside perimeter of Sally's front garden, and then stalled near the gate. I felt sorry for it, but I wasn't going to spend all day watching a stationary cat. The next time I looked it was meditating in the front garden by the gate. Bless it, I thought, it misses Sally. While the cat became anxious, I grew irritated. Irrationally, I felt that my effort to be kind was wasted. I am lazy, I didn't want to retrieve the tomatoes; but that wasn't it. At 6pm, my task should have been complete by now. But, that pesky hyper-vigilance had put an event in my mind that interfered with my pleasure in giving: the other neighbour coming out of Sally's front garden; Sally must be on holiday!

I look out of my window a few times a day because I use a VDU quite a lot throughout the day and periodically check my eyesight by trying to make out the car registrations some way across the road. I have had eye-surgery on both eyes to improve my vision. But yesterday, the tomatoes on Sally's doorstep, the cat and the other neighbour put me into a very uncomfortable position, because I was primarily looking for Sally's car, like her cat.

If giving is stressful, why do I do it? This morning, I think I have a solution. At Christmas or other religious occasions when gifts are given, the exchange of gifts is not complete until the recipient actively accepts the gift, if both the giver and recipient are together. Just be aware, I rarely give wrapped gifts. If I give a wrapped gift, I feel that I own it until it is opened. Then it is yours. I think I need to reel myself in a bit and consider the gift to be yours once I have wrapped it. Essentially, the job is done; careful selection from a huge choice of alternatives has taken place and an effort to conceal it for an element of surprise to occur has been accomplished. Job done. The easiest part is simply to hand it over. That is pretty callous isn't it? It is no different to handing someone a hairbrush that their aunt gave them last year. This is yours. I have no use of it. I place no value to it beyond the respect I have for YOUR pleasure in owning it. 

And there it is. For a brief moment, a gift-giver owns some of the future pleasure of the recipient. This is a recipient handing over their vulnerability to someone else. For someone like me, terrifying. Perhaps, for nearly everyone else not feeling vulnerable, curiousity; 'Oooh! What is it?'

Am I looking too deeply at it? I think so.

In giving Sally some tomatoes, I was not reciprocating kindness. I have a protocol for that. Of course! A couple of years ago, Sally bought me a baking tray, not as a gift but because it is easier for her to transport it than for me. I gave her the money, and left some lemon juice, white vinegar, and olive oil on her doorstep (she told me she eats a lot of salads). She also got a Christmas card from me that year, thanking her for her kindness.

A long time ago, I acquired an American style double-door fridge-freezer from a customer and gave it away to a relative. I wasn't bothered that my relative didn't jump up and down with glee. What bothered me is what my relative did when I was absent from the room. My relative's daughter told me that the recipient hugged and kissed the fridge-freezer and cried, 'I have always wanted one of these!' She went on to tell me that the recipient did not want to show me her happiness because she did not want to feel beholden to me for such an extravagant and suitable gift. I think the 'want' exceeded the actual money value though. Sad isn't it?

It was a gift from me. I don't charge people for receiving gifts from me. It is entirely free. Free from reciprocation, guilt, or dishonour. It is free. There is no emotional debt.

I had learnt a valuable lesson from a past girlfriend when I was eighteen. I had been working in Germany and got friendly with a local girl. The English Channel and hundreds of miles separated us later, and I wrote to her a few times, but she never replied. Eventually, I resorted to telling her that she was being disrespectful by not responding because she was beholden to me because I had gifted her so much. I received one letter from her in German, despite her English being excellent. Essentially it said. 'Never add up what you have done for someone, in case they can add up more that they have done for you'. She gave me something intangible, friendship and intimacy.

In leaving tomatoes on Sally's doorstep though, when I was becoming convinced she was on holiday, I had negative feelings building. Not so that I would be angry or not sleep, or anywhere close to that, and certainly not so I would want some kind of recompense. I think I was sad that my gift would go unopened and the sentiment behind giving would dissipate. Only I would be aware of the moment and nothing would be shared. It would be another isolating event for me. Eventually, I handed over responsibility, in my mind, to the other neighbour to put the tomatoes in Sally's fridge when she came to feed the cat. It was in doing that, that I no longer owned the gift. Absolutely the same as if I posted a gift. 

Sally did come home yesterday, and I hope that she smiled when she realised that the egg-box didn't have eggs in them. It did have a note inside that read, 'For your salads.' I am still freely grateful that she helped me a couple of years ago.

And, Petra, in Germany, you gave me more than you can ever know with a single sentence; you taught me that I should let go.