Life, death and meter reading

At a house in Hillsdale I visited each month to read the electric and gas meters, there was an enclosed porch and sitting inside a ghostly old guy tethered to an oxygen tank worked jigsaw puzzles on a TV tray. He’d wave me in and never spoke, saving what air was left in his lungs for more important things, like breathing. He was there every month until one day he wasn’t.

An ancient, overweight golden retriever in Rochelle Park, whose white fur had overtaken the gold, dutifully lifted itself from his bed whenever I entered the house to follow me to the basement door in the kitchen, shedding fur with each step. During one visit, there was no sign of him except the empty dog bed, still covered in white hair.

Life is what happens between the 30 day visits from your friendly neighborhood meter reader.

Sometimes life happens on the day the meter reading is scheduled. As I stood in the rain at a back door in Bergenfield, an older woman indicated she’d be right with me. I waited a long while before another woman came into view and yelled for me to come back another time. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance pulled up to the house. I didn’t see what happened next and didn’t want to know. Maybe there would have been some sort of an emergency regardless of whether I was at the door or not, but my timing could not have been worse.

To get to the meters in a Baptist church in Hackensack, I had a key to the front door. Mid-morning sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows, which helped when I saw I wasn’t going to be alone this month; there was an open coffin at the altar holding a black woman. The door to the basement was just to the right of the altar so it wasn’t like I could keep my distance. I had to walk right past her. While rationally reasoning that there was nothing to be bothered by, I went downstairs, read the meter and got out as quickly as possible.

A couple of blocks over was a growling pit bull kept in a cellar cage (near the meters of course) or sometimes on a short chain leash. The homeowner always went downstairs with me, for which I was continually grateful. The dog was a beast and I was sure that if it ever got loose while I was down there by myself it would tear one of my legs off. One day as we went down the stairs she said, “Don’t worry. He won’t bother you no more.” Exact words. The dog was downstairs laying on its side, quite dead, a trickle of dried something coming from its body. I’m not sure what kind of life it led, but its death felt pretty recent. I hope it wasn’t painful.

Spanky the setter and his owner greeted me every month in front of their open garage door in New Milford. Spanky was friendly, the kind of dog who just wants you to pet him. One day as I walked up their driveway, the homeowner was outside alone. He started sobbing. “Your friend’s not here anymore,” was all he could get out. How did this dopey job get so complicated?

Not that it was all gloom and doom, the grim reaper lurking in the doorway of every home and business. One favorite moment was when a mother with a bunch of little kids in Bergenfield offered me a glass of apple juice, leading to this advice from her roughly three-year old daughter: “Apple juice makes you poop.” To which the mom replied, “Aren’t you a charmer?” You had to be there.

Finally, the meter reader’s wet dream. Summertime and I’m cutting through backyards in Washington Township calling out “Public Service” to let the neighborhood know I was around and not to come up on someone unexpectedly and scare the bejesus out of them. I cut through some hedges high enough to block out the view of the next yard and came across a woman with headphones on. (It was the 80s; maybe she had one of those cool new Walkman cassette players). She couldn’t hear me. She couldn’t see me because she was laying on her back sunbathing. Topless. More embarrassed than anything, I took a step backward behind the shelter of the hedges and quickly got away from her yard, lest anyone – especially the sunbather – think I was spying on her. An hour or so later, while working the other side of the street, I went over and tried her front doorbell. She answered wearing a robe. No need for modesty now, lady. If you only knew.