This is my favorite hijink from next door, although typing that feels foolhardy!

Maggie, as you may recall, fell down the stairs last summer, broke her tibia, healed poorly, and is now mostly crippled. She has a cool scooter and emailed me she was building a ramp to her house (or was it in her house? I don’t know). I don’t respond to these emails, mind you. I just read them.

As a full-fledged disabled person, she has recently commandeered the parking spot in front of her house and now has a handicapped icon stencil painted in this spot. It’s not even a spot. It’s just the street in front of her house.

What isn’t seen is a metal sign that says Handicapped Parking Only wired to her gate. On Saturday evening Calvin and I interrupted the installation of this sign by Maggie’s handyman/paid family member on Saturday as we were on our way out to dinner.

Have you met the Potemkin Handyman and other Potemkin family members

This handyman now drives Maggie’s car and brings his children and wife to visit her on weekends. Meanly, we refer to all of Maggie’s helpers as Her Potemkin Family. They are a celebrating type of crew. The Handyman and a few of the Helpers bring their kids over on weekends and they whoop it up in joyful faux family style. Maggie loves this, it’s clear to see, and I do feel a tiny bit of guilt writing this down.

Then again, don’t torture your real family, friends, and neighbors to the point where none of them visit and only the paid people remain.

The case of the Ditmarston feline escape

The Handyman had been very nice to us earlier this week when one of the cats, Venus the adventuresome, foolhardy, legally-blind tortoiseshell, got out of the house in the middle of the night. How did that happen? Well, you can ask Wyatt, who apparently had some late-night rendezvous with a pal and left a door open. I think Wyatt has been sufficiently shamed for this, but soon Venus will be wearing a blaze orange collar with my cell phone number embroidered on it, so he must forever be reminded of how he almost lost the cat.

How this happened was Calvin and I woke up Monday morning and the cat was gone. This is a creature that loves us very, very much around 5 AM and 5 PM. That is when she sits cozily on my chest and then aggressively licks herself. But there had been no early morning friendly aggression, and then only one cat showed up for breakfast. We then freaked out. First we couldn’t find the way out, so we left cabinets open. These were places other cats had found and crawled into weird spaces.

Then we walked the block and the alley and Calvin thought he saw her, then found a different feral cat, but 2 hours later Venus came back. She scaled the front windows and clung to the screen while the Handyman, who was outside on Maggie’s stoop, gave helpful advice to Daisy, who was inside. He told Daisy to pull in the screen. She did it, with the cat hanging on to the screen, and lost cat was found cat.

The relief was vast.

So we are on good, warm terms with the Potemkin crew. I had also showed one of the helpers a photo of Venus early on during one of my block walks. Still, as Calvin and I walked past the crazy new parking spot (with cones!!!) we were saying to each other: “Is this real? Is this not real? What is this? Can you do this?” And we turned to see Potemkin Handyman installing the No Parking sign on Maggie’s gate. Whew!

So we had to talk to him. And we had a nice chat in which he professed to know nothing about the stencil and the spray painted icon. We said our goodbyes and kept going up the block, where we ran into Neighbor Y and Y’s Mother, who is in her late 90s and recently returne from a long hospital stay.

I used to say hello to Y’s Mother in the years when the kids were smaller, I would pass Y’s Mother sitting in front of her building with her friend and both of their husbands. I thought of them as the Old Farts I knew as a kid, although they seemed much more fun loving, out enjoying the evening. They always waved. Then the husbands died, one by one, and then the other lady died, and then I started really talking to Y’s Mother, and through her met Y, who I would love to do karaoke with one night, although I know she is a little wary of me. I could be crazy, you know. I know I have that affect but eventually people figure out that I’m not crazy.

So, it’s always a pleasure to chat with these two, and Neighbor Y — bam-O! — brought up the new handicapped spot on the block. We were off to the races.

The spot felt fantastical. “If you could get a handicapped spot in front of your house, I would do it in a second,” Y said. Yes, of course she would! It would be the biggest scam in New York City. There would be no spots on the UES at all! There would be NO PARKING SPOTS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK!

What a scam! I am going to bust it wide open, or at least talk to the traffic cop at next alternate street day, which I think is Wednesday morning.