BBC 9: Friendly neighborhood

Some days the streets in Southie after a blizzard are very much like this:

"Last year in South Boston, a woman chased trash collector Vladimir Diaz down Old Colony Avenue with a knife after he took the chair she was using to reserve her shoveled-out parking spot. On N Street, a guy tried to drag him out of his garbage truck, he said. Then there was the group of men who surrounded the truck. 'They just kept kicking it,’ he said."

And some days (like this morning, for me, on my way to work) they're like this:

1)   Leave apartment, climbing up and over and down waist-high piles of crust to get to the sidewalk across the street.

2)   Encounter my mechanic, standing on said sidewalk, having a smoke.

3)   Greet one another in passing.

4)   Get a block further away and remember leaving my lunch at home.

5)   Return home via same route.

6)   Leave apartment and climb up and over and down the same waist-high piles of crustiness to get to the sidewalk across the street.

7)   Encounter the same mechanic ... who, seeing me return and re-emerge, went back into his garage and re-emerged himself, dangling my spare Mazda 626 keys gone missing since its last service call  ... from that Thursday morning in September when he  fixed my flat tire for free.

Yeah.  Since September. And yeah.  For free.

Sometimes it's a good hood.