When Fall Arrives With Rain, Clown Shoes, and Old Memories

Fall may not officially start until the calendar says so, but Jean’s campus has already decided it’s autumn — and it’s bringing rain, acorns, and footwear dilemmas worthy of their own sitcom. This post begins with her trying to keep her clown‑sized “medical” shoes dry on the way to a Mahjong mixer meeting, then somehow detours into hydrangeas that look like prowlers and memories of actual window peepers from decades past. It’s part seasonal update, part true‑crime‑lite, part “why is life like this,” all told with Jean’s trademark ability to laugh at the absurdity of her own First World Problems…. AI

The official start of fall in the Northern Hemisphere is September 22nd at 8:04 EDT which is the day before this post goes public. Rain is coming down hard and fast as I sit here at my computer. Normally I wouldn’t care but today I have to go to our sister campus to play a game of two of Mahjong with two of their residents as we hammer out the details to a Mixer we’re have in October. It was my brain child three years ago to have a yearly tournament and now it’s my brain child to switch the tournament to a mixer. A mixer will be less pressure on some of the old souls I live with who freak out over taking part in a formal competition. In past years I coddled and coerced them into competing. This year I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to herd anxious seniors like caffeinated cats.

Anyway, back to the rain. As I said, normally I wouldn’t care if I have to walk across a rainy parking lot but I don’t like the idea of getting my new, wide-ass shoes wet—the ones I bought because I needed extra room for the dressing the wound center is having me wear 24/7. (When I walk in them, I feel like I should be handing out balloon animals.) Normally on raining days I’d wear one of my older pairs of tennis shoes but my foot doesn’t fit in them in its present state. Oh, my God, these First World Problems will be the death of me. I should be grateful I have shoes in the first place and in the second place would it really be so bad if I got my new clown shoes wet? I call them my clown shoes because that’s the way my non-bandaged foot feels like when I walk in them. Grace may be one of my favorite words but it sure doesn’t describe how I move these days. Who am I kidding? Grace has never been a word that would apply to my body movements. I didn’t give up ballet classes because I out-grew my tutu.

Fall is starting to make it’s presence known around our campus. Acorns are falling. Pine cones and black walnuts are on the ground. And the trees across our green space are wearing a tingle of pink here and there as are the hydrangeas on the other side of my window. Those hydrangea blossoms are as big as a man’s head. A few nights ago I mistook one for a window peeper. That brought back a conversation we had at the firepit a few weeks ago when a fellow resident said she asked Management to replace the hydrangeas in front of her window because she kept thinking she had a window peeper. At the time I thought she was being paranoid but now I understand how that could happen. Or did she plant the idea in my subconscious? By the way. She has clout here. The hydrangea outside her window is gone.

Back in my twenties when I lived alone I had a window peeper. My neighbor across the street used to sit on his porch to smoke and every so often he’d call me to tell me someone was peeping in my bedroom window. Then he'd chase the guy but by the time he got around the corner of my next door neighbor’s house there was no sign of which way he went. We finally figured out that my next neighbor and the voyeur were one and the same. He’d just slip in his back door when the man across the street came after him.

I was in grade school when the concept of window peeping first touched my life. My aunt had one several times and it freaked her out to the point she’d call my mom to come over. My older brother and I were too young to be left alone and my dad worked nights so my mom would haul me out of bed and we’d get to my aunts house about the same time as the police. Mom would plop me down on my aunt’s couch like a tiny, pajama‑clad security detail with a blanket and pillow while the grown ups talked in the kitchen.

I never called the police about my Peeping Tom. For some reason it seemed like that would give the guy an extra thrill, knowing I was frighten. Google AI says window peepers do it “mainly out of idle curiosity, nosiness about how others live, or malicious intent such as stalking and voyeurism.” Since I’m still alive to talk about my peeper, I’m guessing, he wasn’t stalking me with malicious intent. But just in case you have the urge to try it, window peeping is a crime in all 50 states. Peeping Tom’s are prosecuted as misdemeanors same as loitering and disorderly conduct with punishments that could include up to six months to a year in jail plus fines. If you use a camera, it’s a felony offense and you could end up as a registered sex-offender.

I’m pretty sure Peeping Toms are quaintly old school now, replaced by internet stalking or visiting blogs and Facebook pages incognito. There’s a strong line, however, between stalking and lurking online. Lurkers are harmless and all bloggers have them. Lurking is defined as “passive observation without interaction, while stalking is a repeated, unwanted pattern of behavior meant to harass, track, or frighten a specific person.” Lurkers rarely let their presence be known where the same can’t be said about stalkers. I had a malicious stalker once but that’s a story for another day. How’s that for a cliffhanger? ©