I don’t like it when friends bring up frightening things. I won’t mention them but mainly they will start out as quite innocent observations like, “Oh. look at the Branson home. I see both flat screens are playing the same television shows in two different rooms. Why doesn’t the son just come out of his room and join the rest of the family in the living room?”
I don’t like it when I know someone who is spying into someone’s house. Though I have done myself before. Not deliberately of course, but when you live in a town as small as I do, people tend to just let all things hang out, if you know what I mean.
I once came back late from shopping in Houston back in 1978. It was dusk. I drove a Lincoln Towncar at the time–you know those how ridiculously quiet cars those cars are. And it was almost nightfall. So I parked much deeper in my driveway, under the small grove of trees, next to the shed. This put me in the line of sight of my backyard neighbors. The Ramos family. I could see the whole family at the kitchen table, all four of them sitting down to eat. I could smell their food.
The nose of my car was only a few feet from their back fence. So I walked up to their fence. Dinner aromas surrounded me.It had been a long day in Houston and I’d skipped lunch. So I sat there watching them  passing around dishes and bowls. I could see, even from here, that they mostly used plastic—including their utensils. Poor things.
Even the window window I saw them through, large enough to see them all, including their bare feet, were draped in those plastic cheap curtains from Dollar Bill’s. So sad.

After they’d served themselves, I saw them join hands. They bowed their heads. Grace was uttered in Spanish by their father, a rotund man who drove a truck for a living, I think.
I waited until the prayer was over. I would have even stood there for the entire meal but a cloud of mosquitoes had found me and I decided to go into my own house.
Since I’d parked essentially at the back of my own house, it was easier to enter through my kitchen. My kitchen smelled of anything but food.
But I did say a little prayer. Not Grace, mind you, but something that didn’t remind me of food.