A friend reminded me of a story the other night and I can’t believe I’ve never written this one on my blog!

We’ve all heard the terms “gated community” or “exclusive neighborhood” before, but I encountered perhaps the most exclusive neighborhood in the city…

…or at least one resident of the area felt that way…

From June to the end of August, Sunday’s mean one thing, and one thing only to me: GOLF.

Well, golf and new episodes of Entourage, but you get the idea.

In August of last year, I was coming home from a great round at Deer Park Golf Course with my friend Galen, and we were talking up a storm.  Galen was suggesting that I meet, date, court, and subsequently marry a friend of his girlfriend’s, named Rommy.

He described Rommy in typical guy-fashion, leaving out no pertinent details, and then added “By the way…..her family is ridiculously rich!”

This was actually a bit of a turn off for me.  To each, his own…

But Galen was persistent that I should meet the girl, and ironically our conversation was taking place just as we were exiting Highway-401 near the girl’s family home!

“Okay, let’s just take a drive by her street and you can see where she lives,” Galen said.

I immediately thought this sounded kind of stalker-esque, but what the hell—I’m in real estate, and looking at houses is my job.  It’s my birth right!

We turned onto Mildenhall Road in prestigious Lawrence Park, and we both marvelled at the magnificent houses on the street.  On the section north of Lawrence, the houses back onto the ravine and are situated on acre-sized lots.  Sure enough, Rommy’s house was the biggest one on the street.  Slightly less than FIVE acres.  Yes, FIVE!  Think about how big that is for a house in the city…

Galen and I both had our faces pressed up against the windows……of my car, not of her house….thankfully!  Yeah, that would have just been weird…

Her house was just your standard six-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion of 7000-square feet.  If the pool and the basketball court didn’t take up so much space, they could have made the house larger.

Galen and I slowly drove up the street looking left and right at houses on both sides of the street, and we stopped in front of one new house that looked as if it had just been built so I could make note of the address and check on MLS history to see what the original lot sold for.

We then turned onto Lawrence Avenue and waited in line to turn south onto that strange Mount Pleasant intersection.

All of a sudden, we heard the ‘screeeeeech’ of car tires as a Lexus SUV pulled up beside us, and a woman in Prada sunglasses frantically motioned for us to roll down our window.

“Were you just on Mildenhall?” she asked.  “Were you JUST on Mildenhall?” she asked again before we had a chance to answer.

She was a woman of probably 38-years-old, no doubt wearing a Lu-Lu-Lemon tracksuit (I couldn’t see because the glare from her diamond ring was so bright).

“Yeeessss…..why?” I asked her.

“Uh huh…Uh huh….WHAT were you doing there? Huh?  What the hell, were you JUST doing on Mildenhall?”

Galen replied, “We have a friend that lives on the street.”

“Okay well guess what?  I have your licence plate number,” she said as she held up a piece of paper with my seven-digit apha-numeric code jotted down.  “So you’d better start talking!”

“I’m in real estate,” I told her, as I watched her knuckles nervously tap on the steering wheel.  “I was checking out the new builds on the street.”

“Right, right,” she yelled at us as if to say she didn’t believe us.  “Show me!”

At this point, we were both in shock.  “Shock” is the word for it, since we weren’t yet upset, and just had no clue what the heck was going on.

I handed my business card to her through the window, and she held it an inch from her face like an overzealous sleuth.

“NOT good enough,” she said.

I was now unsure as to whether it was blood, urine, or both that she would require, and she said “Okay, you know what?  Pull over!”

Damn.  Did I just get pulled over by an undercover cop?

No, no I didn’t.  It was just a bored soccer-mom with far too much time on her hands.

“Pull your goddam car over or I’ll call the police!”

The light was now green, and people were honking their horns, so I made my left turn, and that was the end of that…..or so I thought.

I went to bed that night thinking that perhaps this was not over, and I was right.

The next morning, I came into my office and the receptionists started to giggle at me.

“Heyyyyyyyy….you’re okay,” one of them said.  “How’d you get out of jail so fast?” another asked.

I immediately went upstairs to the manager’s office, and she told me “Sit down, and close the door.”  She was smiling, but I couldn’t decipher whether that was an authentic, happy smile or one of those “you’re in trouble” smiles.

“So, David….what happened on Mildenhall?”

I frantically raced to tell her the entire story, and she calmed me down.  “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” she said.

But she told me that last night while at a family dinner, her Blackberry buzzed with a message “CALL JANE DOE, RE DAVID FLEMING RE POLICE ASAP.”

It seems the Mildenhall Maven had the Bosley’s paged and was threatening to call the cops!

“She told me the entire story, or at least her version,” President Bosley explained.  “But when she told me, ‘So that’s when I got in my car and began to follow them,’ I knew she was a freaking lunatic.”

“Well I’m glad you gave me the benefit of the doubt,” I said, unsure of whether or not I was being sarcastic.

The whole issue blew over in a matter of hours, but it left that familiar feeling of being violated or wronged.  All I was doing was driving down a street in the middle of a gorgeous summer day, and some crazy lady took it upon herself to police the area and tarnish my reputation.  I can’t imagine what the thoughts and expressions were at that family dinner when the President of our company read “RE DAVID FLEMING RE POLICE.”

The part that really gets me is that I look like a totally normal guy, as does my friend Galen, and we were driving in a brand new Toyota Corolla.  It’s not like I was driving a beat-up Jalopi, or a pimped-out Cadillac with a blue flag hanging out the left side (“But only on the left side, yeaaah that’s the CRIPS side.”  Snoop Dogg, anyone?).

Was this crazy woman within her right to make police threats and call the president of my company to inquire as to whether I really was who I claimed to be?

Canada doesn’t have nearly as many gated-communities as does the United States, but when people exist in this world like the woman on Mildenhall, who needs gates?

By the way, house values on Mildenhall Road have absolutely soared in the past couple years.

I guess it’s due to the non-existent crime rate…..