The Painter

For about ten years, Edward has been painting for me when I need it. He arrives about nine and stays until dark--painting, listening to country music, and taking care of everything on my list as long as it doesn't involve electricity.  Today, I wasn't feeling well, so I went out to the casita to sleep, and when I came back, he'd washed the dishes and cleaned the bathroom and done several other things I hadn't even asked him to do.

Edward takes about three smoking breaks an hour, but he factors that in when he tells me at the end of the day how much I owe him--which is usually, "Whatever you want to pay me."

After my nap, a younger guy showed up with birthday cake in hand.  It was Sebastien, sharing his 9th birthday cake.  I told him he's the coolest nine-year-old I know--which he is.

Edward and I sat down and shared that delicious slice of birthday cake and talked.  "You know what I want engraved on my headstone?  That I was born to help people.  And the word, Peace."

"So why are you talking about gravestones?" I asked Edward who's in his mid-fifties.

"Well, because I still haven't done everything I want to do in this lifetime."

"So what do you want to do?" I asked.

"Have a quiet peaceful place to live like yours.  Maybe jump out of an airplane.  And race a car at a hundred miles an hour.  Mainly have a place of my own to live without having to share a house with my two deadbeat brothers."

He's been telling me this for years, but he can't afford a place of his own.  The three brothers live in their parents' house and he promised his parents before they died that he wouldn't throw them out.

"I love 'em, but I don't respect them. They just sit in front of the big screen TV all day and eat crap and do nothing. I swear if there was a hole in the floor, they'd walk around it and not fix it.  They don't wash the dishes, don't clean up after themselves.  It's like living with two hoarders.  And I like kids, but I'm tired of the five kids next door coming in to use my water when theirs gets turned off."

The last thing he does is toss the two paper plates in the trash.  "I'm just like my mother," he says.  "She was always cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.  That's me.  It's hard to believe we were raised the same and my brothers turned out to be slobs."