What Are The Neighbors Going To Think?

First of all, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to live life constantly worrying about what people are going to think of you.  Of course most people want to be liked and respected, but worrying too much about what other people think just seems like a recipe for a lifetime of stress and unhappiness.  It has occurred to me, though, that sometimes there are perfectly innocent things that look pretty bad from the outside looking in. 

At Thanksgiving I made a pumpkin pie for one of the security officers at work.  He and Nick work for the same agency, he’s super nice, and is Duke’s honorary uncle.  His Thanksgiving dinner menu didn’t originally include pumpkin pie.  He wasn’t happy about it, and it sounded like sacrilege to me, so I told him I’d make him a pie and he could pick it up on the way home from work.  It’s not a big deal to make one more pie when you’re already doing lots of baking.  And we live close to work, so it wasn’t a big deal for him to come get it. He came over to pick up his pie after work the day before Thanksgiving, so he was in uniform, and driving a work car.

Later on I started to wonder what the neighbors might think if they had seen him come by.  The kids next door are the best neighborhood watch you can possibly imagine.  Seriously, if anyone is ever tasked with investigating anyone or anything from our neighborhood, they need to talk to the kids next door to us.  Because of that I was pretty sure they had seen.  So when they came over on Thanksgiving I made sure to tell them that it had been a co-worker of ours picking up a pie.  They had seen, and told their parents that the police were at our house.  Fortunately, the kids thought it was pretty cool that we got a visit from a uniformed officer, and the family knows where we work, so they realized that it wasn’t for anything bad.  I’m not sure what the neighbors we don’t know thought if they saw.

I’m also wondering about some of the people from the fire department Nick volunteers at.  We live too far outside of the district for them to come here for any of the holidays, but it’s not uncommon for the department to go to someone’s house for a holiday meal, with the understanding that they may have to leave in a hurry.  Now I kind of wonder what their neighbors think when the fire department shows up at their house every Thanksgiving or Christmas. 

So what about you? Are there any goings on or visitors to your house that might make the neighbors wonder?  Or are you re-evaluating anything you’ve seen going on at your neighbor’s house?