DEAR ABBY AND EMILY POST...

A note on the photo. I took this right after I graduated from highschool while on a student language immersion program while in an airport waiting room. A bunch of smoke suddenly came up and the people working there said that "They hoped it wasn't one of theirs." We then had to get on a plane. It's not great quality, but that's a plane in the background (with the smoke behind it) and a hangar to the left of it.

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.....If you read any of the advice columnists in newspapers or magazines, a lot of them involve questions about neighbours. Well, mine would have been a new one. Never mind the barking dogs or unruly children. My neighbour has moved so I can blog about it now and not offend should he by chance come upon this.

.....What would you do if your neighbour disclosed that his very good friend was a terrorist? Oh, excuse me---an accused terrorist? My friend was talking with my neighbour and in so doing my neighbour admitted that his friend was currently facing trial for a bombing which had brought down an airplane that had killed well over one hundred people. My neighbour also brought to light a little known fact that his friend had interests in a hotel in a tourist area near the town where I live. I can see keeping that bit of knowledge hidden. It tends to keep the customers away.

.....There's an old adage that you can't pick your family but you can pick your friends. It does say something about you. What kind of a person would choose to hang around with somebody who did that? I had always been polite to him in the past, especially given the fact that I felt he had been unfairly targeted. There had been a letter in the local paper about his electronic's repair which he ran out of his basement. I had seen the police there. I felt that it was related to his ethnicity and what I often called the "vanilla wonderbread" mentality of some of the people born in this town.

.....Things began to get odd, however, and it seemed like a scene out of the film"Arlington Road." I have OCD when it comes to certain things. One time he told me he was from Kuwait. Another time he said that he was from Saudi Arabia. He had a wife with two little girls. Before I knew it, they were gone and there was a new wife.

.....The strangest event of all was when the trial finally took place. The day it ended, my neighbour was gone. He had never had the house for sale and had never talked about it. He left the country literally in a flash. The new wife? He left her too. He told the new owner that he was in Kuwait, yet when something needed to be finalized, the phonecalls came up as originating in Pakistan. And perhaps it is sour grapes, but those in the electronics business said that he wasn't qualified in the trade. All very odd.

.....So, what would you have done? I continued to be polite. I am reserved with most people at the best of times. But I could never get the image of those people falling from the sky out of my head.