"It's the beginning of a better one," I said.
Dale considered that for a while, then nodded and walked home. The ceramic geese were still facing his front door, where his wife had turned them during the week when he was uncertain how to behave toward me. Before he went inside, he bent down and rotated both of them toward the road. I watched him do it without letting him know I was watching.
The following Monday a shoebox appeared on my porch.
It was an ordinary brown shoebox, its lid held closed by a length of string. There was no note. Inside, nested in a folded dish towel, lay nine gray garage remotes, some newer than others, each with a little clip that had once fitted onto a car visor. I counted them twice. Nine households, nine devices that had opened my private garage for years and that no longer had the power to open anything at all.
Nobody had demanded that the remotes be returned. The locksmith had made them useless. There was no practical need to put them on my porch. I understood the gesture anyway. It was the closest some of the neighbors could come to acknowledging that they had accepted something they were not entitled to use. Returning a useless object can be a meaningful act when the object once represented permission nobody had the right to give.
I took the box into the kitchen and set it beside the folder of notices. For a long time I simply stood there looking at it. I would have welcomed an apology. I would also have found a spoken apology difficult, because the temptation to say "It doesn't matter" would have been strong, and it did matter. Nine people had been willing to open my garage while its previous owners struggled to make the behavior stop. I did not want to erase that fact merely because the people had finally understood it.
But the shoebox was something honest. It had no letterhead, no embossed seal, and no signature written to look authoritative. It did not pretend to be a rule or demand a fine. It was simply nine little pieces of plastic, surrendered in the hope that we could begin behaving like neighbors instead of members of opposing camps.
The neighborhood did not become friendly overnight.
That is not how communities work, even when they have finally agreed that an obvious wrong was wrong. For several weeks the people on Larks Lane approached me with the cautious politeness of people who had recently discovered that they were capable of making a poor collective judgment. They waved, but sometimes too quickly. They asked whether I needed help carrying something, then seemed embarrassed when I said I was fine. I could see them struggling to decide whether the next act of kindness would be welcome or would feel like an attempt to purchase forgiveness.