“We had,” the man said, then paused. He put his hands on his hips and lowered his head. After a moment, he raised his head and continued: “We had a thing happen.” He was standing in the doorway to the home I lease, a place he had entered and left a few times in the preceding days.
When the handle for the cold water tap in my bathtub fell off, I notified my lessors of the problem. They responded immediately, and came to assess the damage. After this visit, I was notified of the advent of a plumbing contractor to address the problem. A time was established for a contractor to examine the tub-works, and establish a date for demolition and repair. After the contractor’s visit, I received an update from my lessor, saying that the problem was going to be addressed by replacing the “entire shower surround and fixtures.” As the daytime caretaker for my 21-month-old granddaughter, I was hopeful that her nap times would be little disturbed, but resigned to the fact that – yeah: they would.
In early March, workmen came and went, and my granddaughter said, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” to each one she saw. I worked to keep her out their way, with a modest degree of success. At one point, a man paused in his passage from bathroom to porch and asked me, “Do you speak Spanish?” He had heard me speaking Spanish to Myah — small terms — and I was listening to the Cuban trova guitarist and singer, Compay Segundo on my Bluetooth speaker. “Un pocito,” I replied, and he smiled, and continued onto the front porch to cut something. The work was completed, and I confirmed the time when we — father, daughter, granddaughter — could start using the tub. And then, as Paul Simon sang, “There were incidents and accidents, hints and allegations.” Some things happened well, and others — not so much, and the contractor was required to return on two other occasions to correct the things that did not happen well. It was on the last of those corrective visits that, from my chair near the door, I heard the man’s story.
The man’s 19-year-old nephew was working on his car in the family’s garage, and closed the door to the garage. “We found him dead,” the man said to me. This was apparently during the three days that work was being done and redone, on my bathtub. I expressed my condolences to the man, and he continued into the bathroom, and finished his work. He left, for the last time, and I conferred with my lessor and indicated satisfaction with the repair. A few days later, I left for Pittsburgh, Pa., to attend my brother’s consult with his cancer doctor.
My brother had 70% of his colon removed in August 2019, and a 6-month follow-up date was established. During the consult, though the surgeon and assistants were not masked, the surgeon came into the examination room and “bumped elbows” with me, a new reality on March 11th. My brother’s cancer is gone, and I returned to Indianapolis again, happy to have a new shower surround.
I don’t know why the worker in my doorway confided in me, but he was in obvious emotional pain. I am not a talented comforter of those in distress, even of those I know well, so I cannot even estimate the value of what I said to the man that day. I made an effort to tamp down negative judgmental thoughts and gave him some words, words that I hope were of some eventual comfort for the thing that happened.
cjon3acd@att.net