DOUG HARRISON: SADLY, MY NEIGHBORS ARE STRANGERS TO ME

As I pulled in my driveway one day last week, I saw this sign: Please bring back the book bag. After talking it over with my parents, we decided our neighbors must have put it there. Their children have turned the grassy island near our driveway between the ditch and the sidewalk into a bus stop, and they congregate there every morning with other neighborhood kids.

As kids are often prone to do, one of our neighbor's youngsters must have forgotten to get on the bus with his or her book bag and some ne'er-do-well likely swiped it for whatever reasons such people do such things.

But that's just my guess. I really know very little about our neighbors. We've lived in our house almost five years, and I still don't know any of my neighbor's names. I'm not sure why.

Admittedly, our house is rather oddly situated in the far corner of an enormous lot and is walled off from the two streets that separate us from our neighbors by a very handsome stand of mature trees. That physical inaccessibility may account for some of my unfamiliarity.

That and the imposing church my father pastors that towers over and dwarfs our house further back in the lot. I'm pretty sure most of my neighbors are relatively unreligious folks, so that my family's proximity to so much Christianity may be a little off-putting. Except for the Lutheran minister and his family directly across the street from us.

Likely our proximity to a Baptist church is what they find most off-putting. There's no open animosity between us; just an understanding that if we each keep our distance and merely exchange pleasantries on trips to the mailbox, we will remain sufficiently unobligated to discuss the one topic that controls both of our lives and could likely cause an all out brawl if it were to be discussed at any length: church doctrine.

As for the other three families that are nearest to us, I know even less of them.

Their houses form the eastern boundary of a mobile home community, though I still slip sometimes and say trailer park. Over the past few years, the trailer pad near the far end of our yard has housed countless families and three different mobile homes; one burned down; one was run down; and the last one was dragged off sometime earlier this summer.

Frankly, I'm not too sad to see the trailer or its tenants go. This last bunch had perpetual yard sales that never seemed to sell anything, but they did leave the, uh, merchandise in the yard all week, in anticipation, I suppose, of the business they hoped and utterly failed to attract on the weekend.

One of my other neighbors delivers the Post-Dispatch to commercial retailers on the East Side. I guess we should have something of a kinship, his work and mine being so closely related. But we don't.

He has to get up way too early in the morning, which may be why I write for newspapers rather than distribute them.

And then there is the family whose child was victimized by the book bag bandit.

I would recognize the children's mother if I saw her. I've seen her around town in her conspicuous Lincoln Town Car with vanity plates: WRKNGWMN, they say. She does look like a very industrious type.

Industrious, and sincere. So sincere that she's tried asking for her child's property back from the thieves who took it. She even wrapped the sign in plastic, an indication that she intends for it to remain for some time.

Maybe I should go over and compliment her industry and sincerity.

Or maybe not.

I don't really know her that well.