We do not associate

When I was in fourth grade we moved to the house that I lived in until I got married. It's been my experience that when new people move to the neighborhood (or in our case, cul de sac) that the current residents welcome the newbies in some neighborly way...my dad would disdainfully refer to this as the "hi Joe" including a raise of the arm which was supposed to indicate a bbq griller in hand...as in "I'm regular guy grilling dinner and when I see my neighbor over the fence I raise my arm and say Hi Joe!"

Some of these ways include a bottle of wine, a plate of cookies, or just a random doorbell ring to introduce themselves. Our street was definitely of a more extreme version of "hi Joe". They had monthly house parties that rotated through the houses on the street. Lucky for us, we had arrived just in time to be invited!

The selected ambassador came to talk to my dad while he was planting his trees...after listening for a while, my dad raised his hand in what appeared to be the "hi Joe" fashion but instead uttered something that would define us for the next twenty years: "Thanks, but we don't associate."

And we didn't. I was convinced that if something happened to us and we were all murdered gruesomely by my dad, the neighbors would point to this incident as the moment when they knew he wasn't right.