I suppose you could say I have one of those faces or I remind someone of an old friend they once knew and felt comfortable with but honestly, I think it's because I just look people in the eye, smile, and stand around and listen. I try not to rush off in a hurry. I let people know that I'm holding space for them even though we've just met.
Last week I was approached by the woman who methodically and repeatedly, day after day, sweeps the common concrete and blacktop in front of her apartment complex; a large community that houses hundreds of people. She can't wait to tell me, after vigorously petting the min pin, that her mother had ten chihuahuas when she was a kid, all with names straight from the bible. She proceeds to recall the little buggers, squeezing her broom handle, wooden and worn, under one armpit for what is probably the first time in the last few hours. She counts off on her calloused, dusty fingertips...Abraham to Zebediah.
I'm routinely blessed to interact with a cherubic mute man who breakfasts at Stewarts. If he wore a baseball uniform, he'd be a dead ringer for a differently-abled Don Zimmer. Although he's older, he has the smooth kewpie face of a perpetually astonished blue-eyed child that you've just surprised with a sheet cake and balloons on a morning he forgot was his birthday. Our Zim doppelganger wears effeminate sneakers, in a style your Memaw might call 'house shoes', but he balances their grandmotherly charm with an unexpected fistful of chunky silver skull rings and as he stands before me in his periwinkle soft soled slip-ons, I ask him questions to which he utters, urps and ughs while conducting an invisible orchestra; mammoth stainless steel biker jewelry shoved down every arthritic digit; a gleam in his glacier-colored globes which tells me he is an amazing orator despite not possessing a single recognizable word.
But today, I got to chat with a new guy, a guy who is single-handedly re-siding his home, a building rather stately but in need of a facelift.
We've probably walked by this house forty times in the last three months and bit by bit, the old beauty is being veneered a pleasant brownish gray, very much like the feathers of mourning doves.
I get weirdly excited when a city house undergoes significant repair. I can't help but heap praise upon the flippers who are busy pouring sweat and love into a dilapidated home. Hubs sometimes leaves me be and circles the block with the min pin when I start yakking with the tile guy or hollering up to the roofing crew balanced precariously on slate like the chim chimeree stack sweepers of my youth. So, I was pleased when my love stood with me this morning and looked for whomever'd been busting his or her hump on the two story colonial.
Like most days, there is an old van in the driveway. There is a paint splattered boombox playing classic Bryan Adams. I strain my neck to see who's responsible for the handiwork but there's never been anyone there to converse with...until today, that is. Today, Mr. Siding Man is there.
Mr. Siding Man is probably somewhere around my age, though, admittedly, I am a very poor judge of that nowadays. My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be and though my sunglasses are prescription, they're old. Hubs points things out to me all the time and I peer skyward, rather Magoo-ish as I step off of curbs squinting and saying "Where? What am I looking at?"
But I can see that Mr. Siding Man has a short shock of perfectly silver hair and a build suggesting hard work and home cooked meals.
We compliment him on a job well done thus far. He apologizes for the amount of time it is taking him. He is but a one man show and he likes things done right the first time. This would have been sufficient explanation for us, but as I cheerfully flatter his colorful choice of vinyl, he blurts out that he has recently had a variety of below the belt cancers, three rounds of chemotherapy, a prostate left back in the operating room and a bladder surgically crafted from his small intestines. He also mentions that siding work with a colostomy bag is about as uncomfortable as anything you can imagine.
We stand, mouths agape, at the determination this man possesses. I start feeling that familiar heat coursing up the sheath of my spine whenever I am in the presence of someone who has more fortitude and backbone than I perhaps ever will. I want to shake his hand and tell him I am proud to know him, but I really don't know him and shaking hands has become such an overstep in this horribly awkward time; so, instead, I offer simple exclamatory statements suggesting awe and blessings that sound rote but what else can you say when presented with such information? He goes on to tell us that he has two new grandchildren and he is beyond thrilled to be in their lives. Hubs declares that grandkids are definitely something to be thankful for. Mr. Siding Man says this will probably be his last job so that he can spend more time with them.
His last job.
It is then that we realize he doesn't live at this house. He is working on this house. Someone hired this guy to start and complete what for some might be a one-man Sisyphean task but he's doing it...while jamming to Bob Seger's "Against the Wind" as his colon empties into a bag strapped to his abdomen.
Think of that next time you have to mow the lawn or scour scrambled eggs off the stovetop, or watch Bubble Guppies for the hundredth time this week, or pick your in-laws up at the airport. Think of the dog-loving lady forever sweeping a driveway that can't possibly stay clean or the poetry of a wordless, slipper wearing bard, or the cancer conqueror on a ladder wearing his insides on his belt and dreaming of pushing two brand new littles in a double-seated stroller.
And then, after you've done what you didn't want to do, breathe deep, go outside, throw the doors to your beating heart wide open, look your hometown in the eye, and marvel at the sweetness of how everyone starts telling you their stories.
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