Whenever you move to a new neighborhood, you expect to see new things.
On the day we moved to South Tampa, I saw a woman being strangled by a sheep. She waited in a silver Mercedes, with fleece-lined seatbelts that crisscrossed at her neck, while I scraped our moving truck into the driveway. What could she have done, I wondered, to anger a sheep?
People tell us we picked a smart address. The people who say this live all around us, which makes their own addresses smart as well. That's how word-of-mouth works in real estate. It works so well in South Tampa that housing prices leave you muttering the Amos and Andy line, "There's no money in money anymore."
The street we live on is alive with kids and dogs. A parade it is, up and down the street. The dogs are mostly poodles, a few black labs, and one Rin-Tin-Tin look-alike. The poodles are white or black or tan and a few so big you look twice, thinking maybe poodle-envy has at last driven somebody to spring an afro on a Great Dane. Not many mongrels about, and we decide to wait a few days before electrifying this docile pack with our own dog, a feral Chihuahua from Alabama.
The kids are of every sort and they ride bikes and scooters. In the afternoon two boys bicycle past followed closely by their mother. She appears to be of that most popular variety of woman in my new neighborhood, a horse-faced blonde with muscular legs. The muscular legs I'm only guessing at since she slowly follows behind her two boys while talking on a cell inside a massive SUV with a Bush/Cheney sticker on the bumper.
Late the first night a man wakes me calling his dog from the street.
"Scamp," he yells over and over, until it begins to sound like "Camp." And perhaps this confuses the dog, uncertain whether to come running or pitch a tent for the night in our side yard. Scamp is a breed known, I will later learn, as a Labradoodle.
The next day we have some excitement. We lose our cat, Sasha. She's six months old, but already approaching her teenage years in temperament. She sleeps a lot and, when awake, attacks from hiding. The battles that follow resemble the karate showdowns between Inspector Clouseau and Cato, his valet, in the Pink Panther movies.
We search the house for Sasha and then send our two kids into the yard. Pretty soon we have attracted a small army of kids wanting to help. They gather on the back deck, not in a hurry to get started. The boys discuss video games and the girls do cartwheels in the grass. They talk to me easily like I am just another kid.
A 9-year-old girl wearing glasses opens a notebook in her lap and begins to take down the particulars. I guess she's read some Nancy Drew. "What color is the cat?" "Does she have stripes?" "How big is she?" I hold out my hand and the young lady makes a note, not bothered at all that she will soon be hunting a house cat four feet tall. "Is she fast?" she asks.
A small boy arrives with a yellow mouse tied with string to the end of a cane pole. He intends to go cat fishing. "Do you think she'll like this?" he asks. I admire the little trickster for what he's done.
The mob of kids sets off down the driveway, talking and laughing. They walk past where the street curves through a thicket of palms. I go into the living room and sit on a cardboard box, my back against a box, my feet on another box, confident that unless Sasha is hiding in the middle of the street, her fugitive spree will go unchecked. Our house is old, built in 1946, and the window glass is scratched and wavy. I think of the fighter Joe Louis, who used to rub mayonnaise on his windows to keep the FBI from photographing his thoughts. Sasha squeezes out from inside the piano. She stretches and yawns. We are not piano people, even though, mysteriously, we carry it from place to place. It's nice to see the piano being used for something.
I pick Sasha up and walk outside to search for the search party in my new neighborhood. I know she'll like that yellow mouse plenty.
Jim Moore is a freelance writer living in Tampa.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2005.