My Neighbor Rhoda: An Opportunity Lost.

One telltale sign of age is who your neighbors are. For years now, I’ve lived in a 55+ community in the leafy Las Vegas bedroom community of Henderson.

I bought the place because it was close to the airport, a must for a journalism job that demanded frequent, last-minute travel. I liked the swanky backyard pool, jacuzzi and swaying palms, as well as the casita I turned into an office and writing laboratory.

I jokingly called the place my Frank Sinatra pad and, truth be told, I liked everything about my block except one thing: the people who lived there.

In my jaded view, they were, well, just old.

Theirs was a life of arts and crafts and playing gin rummy up at the community center. They were hardly my tribe, I insisted. I was still working, after all, producing, with little time for fun and games and woodworking projects.

I was also proud that I had barely qualified to move in here, and rarely let visitors forget it. Once a twenty-something pal and his girlfriend dropped by.

“Gosh,” she said, stepping out of the car. “This place feels like a cemetery.”

“Yeah?” I quipped. “Well, I’m the youngest corpse in the graveyard.”

At the ripened age of 55, I was still an arrogant little shit.

Then I met Rhoda.

On our street, the mail is not delivered right to my house. Each afternoon, I walk up to a community letter box shared by ten or so residents.

For the longest time, especially during those casual months of early covid, I’d take my midday stroll to the postal box dressed in flip-flops, a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

I joked that I was uniquely qualified for this kind of stunt, because this was a retirement community, so maybe I had dementia and had plum forgot to put on my pants.

Rhoda lived across the street and I’d see her struggle with her trash bins, pushing them to the street while leaning on her walker. So the afternoon before trash day, I would pull her cans out to the street and return them the next morning.

When I was a paperboy, I helped out an old Italian woman named Mary Fuoco, shoveling her driveway and running errands. Years later, I guess I saw myself in the same role with Rhoda, who was 97. I wasn’t 12, but I wasn’t in my nineties, either.

Then I noticed something about Rhoda. She was cool. She told me about her early days in the community decades before, and how the community center had a singles-bar vibe. She laughed at how women caked on makeup and eyeliner to go to the gym, always on the lookout for the latest eligible bachelor.

Rhoda was inquisitive. She asked about my latest project, where I was headed next. I never thought to ask about her life. She was old and frail. I’d run up to get her mail, exchange a few pleasantries and run back to concentrate on my oh-so-important work.

Eventually, a new neighbor moved in, and Jim and I competed to handle Rhoda’s trash cans. I joked that we had both become sweet on her and that if she chose Jim over me, she’d break my heart.

That made her laugh girlishly.

Last July, before I left town on a longterm project, I stood in Rhoda’s driveway with Jim and I told them I would probably be gone until the end of the year.

“Well, we’re going to miss you,” Rhoda said.

“Oh, don’t tell him that,” Jim said, obviously jealous. “It’ll go to his head.”

Before I left, I pulled one of my favorite routines on Rhoda. I leaned over to kiss her hand, but instead made a point to kiss my own.

“I’m from LA, after all,” I said. “We love ourselves there.”

Rhoda laughed.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

Jim gave me the news in late November: Rhoda had died only a week or so before I returned. Now her daughter, Irene, was in town from British Columbia to sort out her mother’s effects and put the house on the market.

The other night, Irene left me a voicemail. She said her mother had told her all about me and she wanted to meet the man her Mom always referred to as “John the Writer” and perhaps give me a keepsake to remember Rhoda by.

The next morning, I walked over to meet Irene and her husband, Wayne. I’d never before set foot inside Rhoda’s house and I spotted the kitchen table where drank her morning coffee and admired her view of the Las Vegas Strip from the back window.

Irene was lovely and polite in the way most Canadians are, and said she and her Mom spoke numerous times a day, often for an hour at a time.

Irene was Rhoda’s confidante. And she’d listen as her Mom talked about her neighbors, including me, and the funny things they said. 

She also told Irene how I’d once stooped to kiss her hand.

“He’s such a gentleman!” she’d say.

Irene filled me in on her mother’s life, how she grew up on a farm in Ontario, Canada, and had moved early on to Los Angeles, where she’d had a career in insurance. She’d outlived two husbands, the last dying around the time I got to know her.

Little had I known that those days I first began to get her mail, Rhoda was in mourning over a lost partner and had only recently fallen and broken her hip, forcing her to use a walker, and discontinue her morning exercise routine there before that kitchen table. 

I never knew, of course, because I was too busy to ask. 

The day before Rhoda died, Irene said, they had shared a glass of wine out in the backyard, and laughed, just like the old days.

I ran into Jim the other morning, and he told me he’d seen pictures of Rhoda as a younger woman, and that she was stunningly beautiful and had apparently once dated Johnny Cash.

Then Jim told me a story that, frankly, almost made me blush.

One day, Irene told him, mother and daughter were on the phone and Rhoda said she’d seen a neighbor (presumably me) walk by for the mail without his shirt on.

She'd laughed and said she’d had the impulse to drag him inside her house.

Oh, Rhoda!

If you were still alive, I’d walk over to your house right now and tell you that you are not Mrs. Fuoco. And I would ask for all those details of being young and beautiful and alive in LA, about the places you’d been, maybe the men you’d dated, about your life.

Lord knows, Rhoda’s last years must have been lonely, and you just never know the thrill you might bring into a neighbor’s life through even the smallest of small talk. 

But Rhoda is gone and my chance at a deeper, more meaningful relationship has vanished with her.

And, guess what, I’m no longer the youngest resident on my block.

Maybe one day, I’ll need help getting my trash cans to the curb. And if some young whippersnapper offers to stop and visit, I hope that, unlike me, he’ll stick around long enough to listen to those fantastic stories from those crazy days so long ago.