In reply to Bruce's story on neighborlyness:

When we moved to York County, Maine, it was about 9 years before our neighbors
along our road would wave back as they drove by in their car. When we had
lived there for 19 years, I once left my brief case sitting on my desk when I
left for a three week project in Vermont. Well, I called my neighbor Larry
Allen and asked him to get my brief case and ship it to me express for
delivery the next day. He said he didn't know how express delivery worked, but
he would get right on it. It arrived the next day with a note that he had to
break up the door a little to get in. When I got home he had completely and
expertly replaced the door jamb and interior casing, matching the moldings and
all. He wouldn't take any money for the whole affair, and apologized for not
getting a couple coats of paint on there before I got back as he handed me the
can of paint he had custom matched at the hardware store. He did let me come
and work with him in his garden a few times that summer. Maine neighbors are
slow to warm up, but make solid friends after a while. I was sorry to move off
that road a few years ago.

About standing around watching your neighbors work:

As I was growing up out in Nebraska, my dad would keep an 18" * stack of brand
new "mule hide" leather work gloves in the field truck. If we were out
stretching fence and someone stopped by to talk, my dad would stop and talk
for about one minute, during which time he would edge over to the truck and
grab a pair of those gloves. By the end of the minute those gloves would be on
the neighbor's hands and they would finish the discussion while all hands went
to work, which proceeded apace. When the discussion was done in three minutes
or in three hours the neighbor would be leaving and handing the gloves back to
my dad. He would say, "naw, they're dirty now, you keep 'em." I tell you what,
my dad was a montivational expert and always had a flock of folks around him
helpin' out. And I learned the lesson of pitching in within a minute.

* 18" was an important specification of this motivational technique. If there
was not a true surplus of gloves demonstrated, (18", which was just a small
part of a whole create of gloves he might have found by the side of the
highway back in the 1940s) the neighbor would never accept the gift. Of
course, he bought the gloves at the asking price at the local feed store in
the next town over, which was another of his motivational programs I don't
have the time to get into right now.

John (just a little woried that I now have stories from the "old days") Leeke