Thumbnail Sketch #1
I’m going to do a series of sketches of people I come across on my walks around Portland and in my neighborhood. I’m not sure how many I will do or how often I’ll post them. I’m imagining them now as quick little bites that I send out between other, longer posts, but we’ll see how things shape up.
It was a cold, sunny morning, unusually so for Portland in winter. It should have been fifty degrees and raining, but instead everything was crisp and bright and sharp-edged. Not freezing, but cold enough that you felt it in your lungs. I’d just gotten the kids off to school and was taking our dog, a cranky little chihuahua mix named Gremlin, for a quick walk around the neighborhood.
I turned a corner. A man stood in front of an apartment building on the next block. Big square head, big square shoulders, an orange construction vest on a big square body. It was P., a plumber who’d done work in our house several times over the years. Even a block away, with the sun in my eyes, I knew it was him. Maybe for the sheer size of him—he always brings to mind the barrel-torsoed Scandinavian contestants in the World’s Strongest Man competitions—or maybe it was something in the way he stood. He knew me, too—the bright red curls, maybe, or the tiny dog—and raised a hand in greeting.
He wore Carhartt overalls, that orange vest, and a t-shirt in spite of the cold. Maybe he runs warm, as big as he is, or maybe it’s because he’s from Denmark so what counts for cold in Portland doesn’t faze him, but the bare skin of his arms was red and goose-bumped.
“P!” I said. “How are you?” It had been at least a year since I’d seen him, or longer. However long it had been since our last leaky pipe.
He was smoking a cigarette, the butt pinched between thumb and forefinger. His eyes went watery, maybe for the sun or for the cold, as he told me that he’d had a hard time getting going that morning. “If this guy hadn’t called me over for a job...” he said, jerking his chin toward the super of the apartment building we stood in front of. P. shook his head, kicking the curb.
The super stood there with a length of pipe in one hand and a shovel in the other, waiting. A nice guy, that super. We always say hello when I walk past with the dog.
“I don’t know,” P. said. “I don’t know anymore.”
Every time he did plumbing work at our house, he and I would talk about his life and his struggles and his sadnesses. Or rather, he would talk and I would listen. Maybe he’s like that on every job, or maybe he finds my ear particularly sympathetic. It’s true that I have the novelist’s receptivity to the stories of others. It isn’t at all an unwelcome thing. I truly want to hear about how his grandmother sold the family’s butcher shop in Copenhagen, and the decline that followed. And I want to hear about his wife’s mother willing her prized grandfather clock to her son, who didn’t want it.
That cold morning on the corner, I asked after his two sons and he said they’d both left home, that they’d had enough of the craziness. I wasn’t sure if he meant his house or this country, since his sons, lucky things with dual citizenship, had the option of moving to Denmark. I knew the oldest had done exactly that several years ago. I think I was meant to ask a follow-up question about the craziness that had driven his sons away, but I didn’t, this time. I let it sit.
“What is it you do for work again?” he asked.
“I teach creative writing,” I said. Usually I say, I write novels and teach creative writing, but I was feeling particularly tender about the state of my current book that day and didn’t want to get into it.
“Creative writing. I wish I was creative.”
“You’re the one who told me how creative plumbing can be,” I said. “Problem-solving all day long, yeah?”
“Yeah. Yeah. But the trades break a body down,” he said, flicking the spent butt into the gutter.
“Well,” the super said.
P. nodded and took the shovel from him.
As I walked away I heard P. say to the super, “Nice family. Really nice family.”