It’s Just a Pineapple

Kathleen Zehr Nussbaum

My friend lives in a planned community with look-a-like “McMansions” on quarter-acre lots strategically placed in cul-de-sacs throughout a myriad of tree-lined, well-lit streets. This community isn’t without its benefits: swimming pools, tennis courts, clubhouses, good schools, and lots of kids to play with. And to be perfectly honest, I have experienced varying degrees of house envy over the last few years.

Yet the liabilities of life in Kings Landing (and hundreds of places like it all over America) seem great. Take the “covenant” you must sign to live here. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a covenant is a “formal, solemn, and binding agreement”. I think of this as applying to deeply sacred contracts like marriage, where you promise faith and fidelity to a life partner—not a contract where you swear to never put a clothes line in your back yard or paint your exterior trim bright teal and pink.

Granted this would be an obnoxious combination of colors, but should a “covenant” really be necessary to prevent this and/or to live in such a community? Apparently so. And apparently my friend and her husband signed one.

So the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Kings Landing decided, would be a good time to enforce contractual details of the covenants. Kings Landing personnel systematically drove by and inspected all four hundred homes to make sure residents were keeping their driveways clean and clear, lawns raked, shutters painted properly. Then they mailed 400 letters to the residents with warnings about everything from poor lawn care to visible garbage cans.

In the letter my friend got, she and her husband were cited for not having the compulsory, metal “pineapple” on their mail box. So, despite rising unemployment and recent closing of Circuit City in our locality (40,000 jobs across all levels nationwide), a rise in foreclosure rates; and three documented suicides in the last month in our zip code related to economic despair, this lovely planned community wants to make sure everyone’s mailbox has a pineapple on it.

The two hundred dollars spent on postage alone could have been donated to the Virginia Food Bank, which feeds hungry families all over our state and is experiencing record shortfalls this year. The time spent driving through the neighborhood, documenting missing pineapples, and writing letters to degenerate home owners could have been spent calling to check on residents who may have recently lost their jobs, given birth, gotten divorced, or experienced any number of unforeseen changes and calamities.

Sadly, this is a microcosm of our culture. People don’t seem to care about the things that really matter. We are more concerned about the “pineapple” than the people around us. We want our outsides to look sanitized and perfect. We don’t want anyone to know that we are struggling . . . that our beds are unmade, our bathrooms have soap scum, the sheets need changing, and, even worse, that we are so flawed. We are full of resentment, hubris, greed, envy, and fear. We keep people at arm’s length so as to continue the façade of our perfect little lives in our perfect little neighborhoods.

Fortunately, the façade is cracking and this just might turn out to be a gift. Yes, our current economic near-depression could turn out to be a gift if it makes people stop pretending. It will be a gift if it stops us from buying things we don’t need, can’t afford, and only want because we are in a trance—the trance of Western greed.

And it will be a gift if it forces us out of hiding and into the light of the real world, there where houses need repair and bathrooms aren’t clean and none of us is without character flaws, bad breath, and body odor. It will be a gift if people stop worrying about the pineapple on the mailbox and start caring about the people inside the house instead.

—Kathleen Zehr Nussbaum, Mechanicsville, Virginia,is a licensed clinical social worker and supervisor.