more on the neighborhood.

So we've run down the list of families from our house on down Coventry Way. I neglected to mention one other house on the street: Next to the Stevenses lived the Toombs. They had kids who were grown and out of the house by the time they moved in, so we collectively had very little to do with them.

They had an enormous dog, a doberman, we figured, named Duke. As they walked Duke, the Toombs allowed him to leave behind enormous piles of doo-doo. Apparently, it wasn't considered polite in the 1970s to pick up after your dog. Duke was, as I mention, enormous, and his leavings were commensurately huge. Every once in awhile, Dad would bump into a pile while cutting the front yard like he ran the mower into a boulder the size of a compact car.

All us kids talked repeatedly about collecting a paper sack of Duke's doo, dropping it on Toombs' front porch and lighting it ablaze. The closest we ever got was ding-dong-ditching them.