Missed appointment

We just got new neighbors who purchased a large, $3 million house located just across our home. The house is quite large and dominate our more modest home like a medieval castle towers over its subjects’ abodes.

The owners come from California, the man of the house has apparently a big job and all the attributes that show his status in society. Since they came on the scene a few months ago, we had few interactions with them, all of them happened when they appeared on their dominating perch and addressed us like the Royal Family addresses its subjects from one of the balconies at Buckingham Palace, implicitly creating a “ruler-to-subject” relationship.

A few nights ago, one of their thirty-something son and his wife were staying alone with an other couple and hollered up to have us climb to their place and share a glass of wine with them. We then had a very pleasant exchange.

On Sunday night, while she was hosing down her trees, the lady of the house addressed both my wife and I from high up in her “castle-like” residence, and invited us for drinks on Monday night at 6 pm. This wasn’t particularly what we had planned for that evening, but out of civility and good neighborly manners, we acquiesced.

So around 4 pm, that night, we began preparing a beautiful platter with delightful snacks and proceeded to climb the many stairs that lead to the imposing residence. On the way out of our house, we were stopped by yet another son of the family that uttered a few words in French and wished us a pleasant evening. His last words were disquieting and implied that he wasn’t going to see us within the next minutes. My wife and I looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and doubt.

Was this the right night, the good time or did we both get confused? In spite of this ominous signal, we soldiered on, climbed to the very top, rang the doorbell, waited some long seconds and when he saw us at his door holding our tray of goodies, the gentleman of the house, obviously not expecting us at all, said: “Sorry, but we have a reservation at the restaurant and we must go now!” I managed to squeeze in: “Well, last evening, your wife invited to come and have a drink with you tonight...”

He sort of said: “Sorry!”, closed the door, and our sole option was to turn around, humiliated and looking like the horse’s ass. We returned home, had a soothing drink in our garden and wondering if we had heard the invitation correctly, but we concurred that we had heard exactly the same thing, the night before.

We had dinner and then went for a 2 miles walk. When we returned home, a good 90 minutes after the incident took place, the man of the house was watering his trees with a hose and said: “Come back on Thursday for a drink!” We both said “No” and I added: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! No, we won’t come.” He said “We just made a mistake!” I responded, “When I make mistake, I apologize”.

We walked back to our front door and that’s when I discovered, stuck on our front door, a post-it note in which his wife had apologized, but by then it was too late, the damage was done and that’s the end of my story.