Your name is served

Neighborhood cookouts serve a lot of functions, not the least of which is to remind you, once a year, of all your neighbors' names, which you will promptly forget until next year's cookout. This year Joe and I were determined that our ignorance would not be so apparent.

"Now, let's go over everyone's names and what we know about them," said Joe, before we left with our contribution of brownies. "Hopefully we can fill in the blanks tonight."

And so we began at one end of the block, naming residents, making up names when we had no idea, and offering little interesting tidbits about them that we might be able to work into a conversation to appear knowledgeable.

"And then there's JB, the dog," Joe was saying.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I thought JB was Amanda's husband."

"No, no, that's CJ. JB is their next door neighbor's dog...can't think of their names, though."

"Well, what is Amanda and CJ's dog's name? I thought the dog was CJ."

He shrugged. (We found out later that it is Levi, shortened to Lee because the cat -- whose name we never did catch -- also has a name with two syllables, and this greatly confuses Levi. Lee.)

When we were finished, we realized we knew more about the dogs who live on the block than their owners. We did know that there was one couple with a baby, a professional bike rider (who turned out to be the dad of the baby, not a separate person), two new couples we knew absolutely nothing about, and two Steves and a Steven. Happily, there are two empty homes, which cut down on the number of names we had to come up with. We gave up entirely on who might have cats.

Feeling confident, we betook ourselves down the street to the cookout. We listened carefully to everyone's conversation, filing away information, and didn't speak much on the grounds that then we couldn't embarrass ourselves. Unfortunately, the one time we did say something, we messed up by calling Chris "Dan" (now we know there are two Chrises, although there could be more). But we were feeling pretty good about appearing to know everyone and what was going on in the neighborhood. Then someone casually mentioned that Steve had moved out.

"Which Steve?" I asked.

"The one next to you," someone else said.

"On which side?" I persisted.

"Phil's roommate."

I was dumbfounded. How had I missed that bright-red car for a week and not realized what had happened?

"And Casey, too," someone said.

I looked blank.

"The dog," they reminded me.

"Oh, right," I said. "Of course, if Steve moved out, Casey would have to go, too," I said, attempting to cover up my forgetfulness of the dog who, for reasons known only to herself, frequently visited our porch.

We found out that Jeff and Kristen plan to move sometime, and also the couple with baby. "Oh, no," I moaned later to Joe. "If they move, and the two unoccupied houses get sold or rented, that means next year we'll have four new households to learn!"

"We can just call them all Steve," Joe suggested. "We're bound to be right some of the time."