The World According To Anne Arky

I have something unusual going on right now that, in point of fact, has really been going on for two years now. Or at least it started two years ago, and then lay dormant for twenty months until this past November. Since November, it has escalated to the point that I have had to involve The Authorities. The reason I never blogged about it in the first place is because the first episode took place about two weeks before I launched Anne Arky Ology, and I figured it was a non-issue.
Somehow or another, I have acquired a stalker, and very soon, we are going to court.

Call 1: I moved into my house in November 2004, and spent the better part of the next two months working on putting up Christmas, with a lot of GMHT thrown in. The following two months, I spent taking down Christmas, with a lot of GMHT thrown in. Combine those, my two jobs and a fairly active social life, and even if I were so inclined, I didn’t and generally don’t have time to harass my neighbors. At that time, I didn’t even have time to know who my neighbors were. So you can imagine my surprise when I got this really strange, out-of-the-blue phone call on my voice mail from someone claiming to be not only my neighbor, but my neighbor who (she says) I have been stalking.

Although I am listed in the phone book, at that time my very new phone number had not come out in a new phone book yet, and I have the Privacy Director feature which stops any number from reaching my home or voice mail if it doesn’t identify either a phone number or a name. Somehow, she found out my name, my phone number and the code to bypass my Privacy Director, and she left a message that sounded so ridiculous, I almost felt like it was made by a delusional teenager. She introduced herself as Kristi and alleged that we all (the cat and I, I guess, since that’s what “we” consists of at my house) had been watching her and making her nervous and I had been talking about her to other neighbors, saying that she didn’t have a husband (like who gives a rip?!) and that she talks tough (she thinks she does, anyway). She said that we all had been making her so nervous that she and her baby had had to go to a motel and stay, and that she used to be in law enforcement and that if she caught us watching her tonight, she will file charges. The whole thing was so silly, but there was just enough of an undercurrent of threat that I decided to call the police and file a report. Not that I expected them to do anything other than, perhaps, pat me on the hand and tell me it would all be all right and not to worry my pretty little head about it. That’s about all they did, and I felt better, hoping that she would be watching me and see that I had invited the cops to come for a visit.

Because my voice mail at home generally drops off saved calls after about five days and I wasn’t sure if I would need to keep her message, I called my voice mail at work and recorded it there, since I didn’t have a cassette recorder handy at the time. I left it there for almost two years (I told y’all I’m a packrat of the first order).

A few months later, I became friends with a neighbor whose teen-aged son was mowing my lawn. I called one evening to tell him to come and pick up his check, and she (his mom) and I began talking. She gave me the lowdown on a couple of neighbors to avoid, and why, and I asked her if she knew anyone in the neighborhood named Kristi and if so, where does she live? She said that Kristi had lived across the side street from me, and that she was truly a nut job, but she had just moved out, thank goodness. Oh, yeah – I vaguely remembered seeing a moving van, but didn’t figure I would be that lucky. She proceeded to tell me of an event that happened a couple of years before, when her son was 14. He had taken a business card to Kristi and asked if she would want him to take care of her yard. A few nights later, he and his mother were at the grocery store about 9:00, and Kristi called him on his cell phone and said that there was someone outside her house watching her and asked him to come and protect her. He told her, “Ma’am, I’m just a 14-year-old boy. If you need protection, you should call the police.” I should think that in the time she lived in our city, the local police would have amassed a file three feet thick on this nutcase. Boy, was I glad she had left the neighborhood! Hopefully, I was through with her!

Not so fast, there.

Labels: Nutty Neighbors