Unneighborly behavior

Bernice Thompson paid $16,000 for her house in Mission Hill. That is how long she's been a fixture in the neighborhood. She has coexisted with every kind of neighbor imaginable in her four decades on Hillside Street.

But her new neighbors have turned out to be a problem. Thompson, retired and infirm, woke up in the middle of the night last week to hear a party across the street raging out of control.

She heard tomatoes coming off the vines in her garden - her pride and joy - and heard them squishing against the pavement and nearby houses. Her college student neighbors probably thought it was a hoot.

For Thompson, it was closer to a death in the family.

"I've never done anything to them," she said yesterday. "Why would they do anything to hurt me? I couldn't believe they could do this to someone they don't know. But they didn't care, as long as they had their party."

Thompson is not some crotchety old lady. She laughs as easily as she cries, especially about herself. For years, she has dealt with personal tragedy by reaching out to others.

That was how she came to meet Larry Kessler, the longtime, now retired, executive director of the AIDS Action Committee in the mid-1980s.

Thompson's son had died of AIDS, a disease she knew almost nothing about. His illness had worsened a serious mental tailspin. One day, on a desperate whim, she walked into AIDS Action and volunteered.

"She said, 'I don't have a lot of skills, but I'm really good with people,' " Kessler recalled yesterday. "We put her on the reception desk, and she was just wonderful. She got to know all the young men and the few women we had then. She got to know their names and made sure they got what they needed, because her son wasn't around anymore."

Later, she offered to write a fund-raising letter. Kessler urged her to try, though he was unsure what to expect.

"She wrote this fantastic letter about what [AIDS Action] meant to her and how it helped her grieve," Kessler said. "It was probably one of our more effective fund-raising letters, and helped recruit other mothers who came in and volunteered."

Thompson, 72, gave up volunteering a few years ago, as her health problems began to mount. She has survived multiple bouts of cancer, suffers from diabetes, and is recovering from a debilitating back injury that has her wearing a brace and walking stiffly with a cane.

The back injury kept her from planting this year's tomatoes herself. Some friends did it for her, after hearing her worry that her days of fresh-grown tomatoes might be over. When she called Kessler after her plants got trashed she told him, "Those tomatoes were like my babies."

This is a college town, and almost every neighborhood has its struggles between students and residents. But the tension seems to mount every year, as students feel more entitled and longtime residents feel more helpless. Everyone from the colleges to the mayor's office says something should be done about this, but not a lot seems to happen.

Case in point: Thompson placed a call Thursday to something called the Problem Property Task Force on Mission Hill, an agency that, according to its literature, is devoted to helping students and other residents live together more peacefully. Should anyone on the task force happen to read this, Thompson is waiting by her phone for someone to call her back.

Thompson stresses that she has nothing against students, or any new neighbors, for that matter.

"I'd like to get to know them and help them get settled in the neighborhood," she said. "If you drink your beer, you drink your beer. Just don't come over here being mean."

They were just tomato plants. But they were also an anchor, something to cling to for a person who has seen much of what she loved slip away from her.

"They just don't know what I've been through," Thompson said. "Or what I'm going through."

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.