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The cuckoo clock caper
It was a dream come true. As soon as my husband and I retired, we moved to our canal boat in France. We’d worked hard and waited a long time for this, envisioning a peaceful life afloat on quiet, lazy canals. But things weren’t working out quite as expected.
Our boat was moored in a marina with about three feet between each boat. Every night I was awakened many times by a neighbor’s cuckoo clock striking just a few feet away. It struck all day and all night, and what was particularly disturbing is that the sound came at odd times, never on the hour or the half-hour. It was jarring, never knowing when the clock would strike.
Living so close to neighbors meant we needed to be accepting and forgiving, but after a couple of weeks I told my husband I was out of patience. That cuckoo clock was annoying, and I would have to say something about it to our neighbors a few boat slips away. After all, I’d been awake most of the night. “I’ll be polite,” I assured him, but I wondered why they’d been so selfish, so uncaring. It occurred to me that we could never be friends with people who were not thoughtful of their neighbors.
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