That is, the man who plowed my sidewalks and the snow around my car.
I was working, but I didn't want to be rude so I offered him company to have a chai and a lavender scone I had made. He is in his mid forties. Not small amount of coverage around his waist. His teeth are more crooked than mine. There are a few scars on his face. But other than that, he is probably considered a handsome man. I could see it in his face, in his eyes. He doesn't have a lot of work now, which is why he is eager to shovel my snow. I think I pay too much for his work, but I think he needs the money more than I do.
He talked to me about all sorts of random things. The most annoying is his talk of evolution, how according to some book I have never heard of he learned all the lies evolution theory has poisoned us.
But that's the only annoying thing. I just listened, repressed all desires to rebuff, and walked him to the door. Before that he was talking about his extended family, some members of which are in the mafia. He said he never had anything to do with it, but he couldn't help bragging about how much he seemed to understand it. His Dad, he said, owned a lot of expensive clothes, especially Italian shoes (they are Italian Americans), how he dated the daughter of the man who controlled half of the Little Italy in my very little city. I met his Dad; a very big man, showing a lot of age now. But somehow, if you could look past his thinning white hair, his giant tummy, the tattered clothes he wore to help me paint my house, if you can look past his present, you can see the swagger and charisma and self-confidence in his eyes. You can also therefore understand the timidness in the eyes of his son. His son, my snow man, was trying to explain in the most repressed way possible how abusive his father was to him, how in the end, now in his mid forties, he still felt he lived in the big old man's shadow, never feeling he's good enough. And yet, he has come away from that shadow enough to be friends with his Dad. Before he left he called his old man twice, to tell him he was coming home. I guess you really can't treat your son completely like a child once he passes forty.
But one thing he said that stuck in my head. He said that while he suffered (again, he didn't use such obvious words) because of his Dad's toughness, he was grateful that the whip, at least figuratively, made him a tough man, that it made him withstand a lot of pain in life that he thought someone else with a more gentle father would not be able to bear. I know not everyone would agree. But I thought about myself (surprised?). I thought about my weakness in the face of heartaches. I look at my hands. They are beautiful, almost feminine, in the sense that they never really had to work. Not like this man's hands. Not like my father's hands. My Dad was tough. But he never made me go through anything physically harsh. He wouldn't be able to watch me go through it without breaking, himself.
This man in front of me, who was hungry for a few more dollars, who was single in his mid-forties, who never misses a chance to comment on some girl, how pretty she was (he did it again today, telling me about a girl he helped shovel while waiting for me to return from the bank). I wondered how he would handle heartaches.
It goes without saying, that it was a beautiful experience talking to a man, someone more real, with nothing to hide that he wouldn't hide from himself.
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