What the Bread, Man?

As I walked through my yard to my car on Tuesday, something on the fence caught my eye. It was bread. More specifically, about a third or a half of a hot dog bun, either bitten or torn off and crumbled up. It was pressed on top of one of the chain link fence posts that separates my yard from my parking spots, and the back alley behind. I swatted it off the fence, not having time to throw it in my trash. I swatted it off because I now have a theory. A paranoid theory, perhaps, and one based on wild speculation. Really though, aren't those the most fun?

This is the fourth time I've found fragments of foodstuffs left around the exterior of my house. When I moved in, there was a half eaten cupcake on top of my mailbox. At the time I simply chalked this up to the weirdass menagerie of previous tenants. The same menagerie that left closets full of clothes, half eaten calzones to bake for months in garbage bag ovens warmed by the sun, and pins stuck through the miniblind strings so that when I drew them I was rewarded with a constellation of bloody spots across my palm.

The mailbox half cupcake was the only non bread item I've found. A few months later there was another baked good on my mailbox; this time a piece of hot dog bun. I promptly threw it away. Then, this winter while shoveling the sidewalk between my house and the neighbors', I found another piece of bun balanced on my windowsill. This was the one that made me wonder.

I mentioned it to Slim Jim, and he said “yeah, the neighborhood kids are always leaving treats around.” I live in a semi urban area. Post industrial, with row-homes galore. Most of my street is duplexes or row-homes build a hundred years ago or more from brick. The population here is a mix of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, old White people, and White undergraduate college students. As you could imagine, there are some tensions. Pretty much between the college students and everyone else.

I used to live in the house next door back in my college days. I remember the thing back then was the neighborhood kids, mostly not yet high school age, would congregate on someone's porch hang out there for hours. The porch would almost always belong to a house full of college students, such as ourselves. I remember I would hear them on the porch and I'd feel uncomfortable. I had to go to class, or out to the store. What should I say? What did they want? I decided on “hey, what's up”, and kept walking, otherwise ignoring them.

One day I brought home a tray of leftover cookies from my work study job. Shortly thereafter, Johnny Blue Jeans, who lived there as well, came home from class and mentioned the kids were out there. He took the tray of cookies out and offered them, and they accepted. A little after that they stopped coming back. A month or two later there was an editorial in the school paper about student-community relations written by a young man whose house was also on our street. Neighborhood kids, he said, were always hanging out on their porch, and no about of pleading, yelling, or badgering would get them to leave.

So I have to wonder: has a new group of children seen my parking tag and taken to setting these gifts about my house in an attempt to rile me? Are the pieces left behind as markers of some sort, and if so, for what intent? Are they part of a test to see how often I'm home or how frequently I check the exterior of my house? Is there a drunk old man who buys a pack of hot dog rolls and eats them while wandering past my house? Is it one of my old college friends playing a sort of long term prank/participating in a sort of personal flux art performance, the very kind of thing I delight in doing to others?

I propose a Thursday toast: to mystery.