I’m so lucky. I live in a little wooden house on the edge of Rainbow Canyon. The road to our house is steep and narrow and up at the top it turns to a narrow dirt track that trucks and low clearance vehicles fear. We wake to the sun climbing over the hills to the east and birdsong. We are surrounded by nature. We feel far from the city below, though it’s only a walk away. I’m so lucky because I live in the kind of neighborhood that I always hoped I’d find. I live in Mt. Washington.

Along with the serenity, there’s the people — artists, filmmakers, chefs, teachers, parents, costume designers, editors, midwives, activists, flight attendants, actors, monks, woodworkers, ham radio enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, writers, set constructors, white, brown, black, yellow and red. All sexual orientations welcome. Incomes vary, values are similar.

There’s a fierce oddball streak present in the neighborhood as well. Canyon people, clingers. On this block alone, we have an old Mexican gentleman who talks exactly like Cheech and feeds a coyote side-by-side with the 15 or so cats that live at his little shack at the top of the hill. There’s Dennis, an old desert/prison rat who yells at the dogs across the canyon to “shut the fuck up!” at 6:30 in the morning. He lives with Vlad, a science-fiction writer who was popular in the 70s and who now rarely leaves his house, and when he does, he wears an Andy Worhol wig. Then there’s Other Dennis, who lives with Betty, both of them thin as a rail and long stringy hair (and Other Dennis with complimentary beard), old junk habits long kicked, who salute every time we drive by.

It’s a great mix of people. And I love getting to know them. Especially when I’m moving slow after a huge meal, appartifed with a little homegrown pot and along side my darling wife, my unborn child and our sweet brown dog Mabel, which is just how I was moving last night when we ran into “the Crazy Lady.”

We don’t know her name or much about her at all other than she lives alone with a dog called Angel Face. Angel Face came to her a few years ago and was a total wreck. He was badly injured and starving when she found him on the hill and had been through something bad, because he would bark and pull and freak out every time Mabel and I would walk past. It took about two years and a ton of work on her part, but she’s gotten that dog to where he’s gentle as a lamb. Mabel now loves him, and he’s real sweet to me as well. It was a remarkable transformation, and I give her a ton of credit for pulling it off.

She does, however, have a tendency to talk. At length. Mostly in a weird, baby-ish “dog” voice (which sounds even creepier with her Germanish accent) and mostly to the dogs. For a long time, she told us that we shouldn’t let Mabel lay down and roll over when another dog approached, and while she was right, we didn’t always feel like a five minute lecture on the subject. But always nice enough and for having done such a good thing for a dog, always deserving of a hello and how are you.

Last night, we saw her chatting with one of the Self-Realization Fellowship monks and we tried to move past her quickly, but Angel Face saw Mabel and pulled her over to us and soon our romantic constitutional was a party of three. Resistance was futile, so we got into it a little bit: heard the long version of how she rescued Angel Face, learned how long she’s lived on the hill (27 years), the whereabouts of her children, and so forth. We talked about the coyote that we call Edwin and she calls Bobby, about Dennis (the dog yeller) and his dog Chopper, and about the intuition and sensitivity of dogs. About our coming child, and pregnancy, and all that. It was a nice evening stroll and chat.

But we call her “the Crazy Lady” for a reason. Obviously, there are some boundary issues, which is fine. And she’s got a laugh and a smile that on a young, beautiful woman might be called “easy,” but would none-the-less be a little off-putting. So needless to say, in the course of our walk, there were plenty of opportunities for E and I to shoot each other the “holy shit this is weird” look.

And it’s a good thing we’ve got that look so practiced, because about 30 minutes deep, I asked where she was from. The answer and its subsequent ramblings were so unexpected that the spookiness reverberates even on this bright summer morning.

So I asked, “Where are you from?”
“Originally?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Austria,” she said.
“Oh, okay. What part?” (I only know Vienna, so that’s what I’m hoping she says.)
She started talking a little faster, “A little town on the southern boarder. Its now in Yugolslavia, but then it was still Austria.” And she smiled her eerie, crooked smile. “I was a little Nazi,” she said, “but I didn’t know.” And then she laughed.

She said that and then she laughed.

And then as we were trying to process that, she launched into a diatribe that made even less sense. “Yeah, so growing up, my father was taken away, and we were put into a camp, and we thought my father was put into a camp as well, but they probably just shot him, which was for the better. Yeah, so when after we got out we went up to Vienna because the company he worked for was based there, but we could never find him. Even the Red Cross couldn’t find him, so…”

What could that possibly mean? How could she have been a little Nazi and been put into a camp? And why had she told us this? We don’t know her name and she doesn’t know ours. Why would you ever say that as a child you were a Nazi? And then laugh?

Okay, obviously she’s totally crazy, and it should be said that this laugh was uncomfortable and ashamed as a laugh could be. It was the kind of laugh that says, I’m not guilty of this, but it was put on me and I’ll never be able to totally shake it off — what luck!

But Jesus. How do you just say that to strangers? To neighbors? We didn’t know what to say back. She launched into the tale of how she left Austria for Canada, and Canada for California, and after that, she said she should turn back. She had a eulogy to write. (For a fellow Nazi? Probably not, but it was never totally clarified.)

We kept walking, now on a dirt path that winds around the northwest side of the hill.

“Did you ever think that in your life you’d meet a real Nazi,” I asked Elizabeth.
“She’s not a real Nazi. She was a child.”
“She said she was a Nazi. That’s as real as it gets.”
“How about this,” E offered, “I never in my life thought I’d meet someone associated with the Nazi party.”
“Me neither,” I said.

We talked about how strange she was, how she’d shanghaied our walk, the discomfort. We talked about how sweet Angel Face was and what a great job she did with totally rehabilitating a broken dog. We talked about how she must be lonely, how she must be a little legitimately crazy. We talked about how nice she was, but how weird she was, and how she had told us that she was a Nazi, and now what do we do with that?

The light was quickly draining from the sky and Mabel was off the leash and trailing behind, her feet so much heavier at night, the smells of the world so much deeper. There’s no motor traffic on this dirt path, which stretches about a quarter mile. There were no other people. The night was still.

“I love this neighborhood,” I said to Elizabeth.
“Me too,” she said.