The bully next door - part 2...

Now, if the trash thing weren’t enough to test my man’s good nature and challenge his position as king of the castle, Orlando had to take it up a notch. The other day, I had clothes hanging out on the line and Orlando came and told Jim it was going to rain. He thanked him, came and told me and we went out to get the clothes…and not a moment too soon as it poured buckets of rain just seconds after we got the clothes inside.

Later, Orlando started speaking to Jim and obviously was telling him something he deemed very important…Jim’s response? “Si, gracias, Orlando.” (See part 1 to understand this reply). Orlando wasn’t falling for that ol’ ploy again. He decided he needed to show Jim what he was talking about. He walked under the roof of the veranda and started motioning from the iron bars on the window and door to the support beams of the roof. He made criss-cross motions and I was able to make out a few words of Orlando’s stern instruction to Jim and realized he was telling Jim he needed to make me a clothesline under the roof so that when it rained, which is every day now, that I could still hang my clothes out.

I wasn’t real thrilled with the idea of having a clothesline strung across our veranda but I loved the thought that Orlando was looking out after my best interests. Jim acknowledged that he understood and told Orlando that he would do that the next day. Orlando and I just looked knowingly at each other. There was an unspoken understanding which transcended the language barrier…we both knew that Jim’s answer was simply to placate. But because my job as a wife is to support my husband, I assured Orlando we would go to the “ferraterria” (the hardware store) the next day and get the supplies.

What I find simply amazing in all of this is I can’t communicate any better with Orlando than Jim can, but for whatever reason, we all seem to think I can and so Jim and I thought my answer seemed to satisfy Orlando. Until the next morning, anyway. Orlando spied Jim bright and early (yes, it was another dreaded trash day…again, refer to part 1 for a clearer understanding of this) and asked him when he was going to put up the line for my clothes. Jim told him that afternoon. Orlando rattled off something and went on about his business…raking and fighting off the bad guys. We laughed about his persistence and I jokingly told Jim he was going to be putting up a clothesline that day, like it or not. A little later, we saw Orlando walking down through the trees and brush towards the area where he disappears with our trash instead of taking it up to the corner…we’ve not had the nerve to walk that path…it’s like it leads in to the deep, dark woods of a Frank Peretti novel…so we just assumed he was off on a trash mission of some sort.

Neither one of us thought much more about the morning’s conversation until we happened to see Orlando coming down the steps to our veranda. In his hand was a coiled up roll of new clothesline wire. He had walked to the neighborhood ferraterria and purchased the line for Jim. Obviously, he (a) suspected Jim’s answer of when he would get the line put up as insincere, (b) he knows my husband is a well-intentioned procrastinator or (c) he has decided we really don’t know what we’re doing. If the truth be known, (c) is the correct answer.

Next came the struggle to understand what exactly it was Orlando wanted Jim to do. We knew he wanted the line put up but there was something else he kept saying. He kept repeating the same word and even after trying to find it, to no avail, in the Spanish-English dictionary, I couldn’t figure out what Orlando was saying. I thought he must just be insisting Jim get the line up right then although he wasn’t ready to relinquish possession of it. Not knowing what else to do, I decided to show him that Jim had already put up a line for me in the now-enclosed laundry room so I could hang clothes up in inclement weather and that it was okay if the line didn’t get put up that moment...remember, I wasn’t too excited about having a line put out on the veranda in the first place. As soon as Orlando walked in to our laundry room, he spied the ladder he had seen Jim using when he was repairing the laundry room roof. His face lit up…that was what he was wanting! He just wasn’t saying the word for ladder clearly enough for me to be able to find it in the dictionary!

So, Jim carried the ladder through the house and out on to the veranda. I laughed and told him I thought his morning’s agenda was changing and he would be putting up a clothesline for me whether we wanted it or not. Somehow what we wanted suddenly was taking a back seat to what Orlando thought we needed. Jim agreed and started to set the ladder in place. Orlando would have nothing to do with letting Jim hang the line. Nope, with great authority and purpose, Orlando climbed up that ladder on his 75 year old arthritic, crippled-up legs and proceeded to string my clothesline. Jim stood behind him ready to steady him, if necessary. We both were fearful he might fall off the ladder at any moment. Orlando would direct Jim where to cut the line, where to move the ladder and how firmly to pull on the line to test it out. As for the rest of the work…it was Orlando’s project, through and through. I could tell Jim was uncomfortable with Orlando doing “his” job but somehow we both knew it was important that we let him do this thing.

Every day, he is out doing work someone else directs. He is in the yard, raking, shoveling mud out of the ditch, taking the machete to the overgrown brush, hauling the yard debris away in a huge bag he slings over his shoulders. Don Carlos always has a list of chores for him to do. He spends most of his days alone…or alone in the eyes of the rest of us. He sits out under the mango tree and I often wonder not only who his battles are with but why he’s fighting them. I wonder what goes on his mind and how he’s been treated most of his life. We were told that he was old, that he was slow…even that he was a little crazy. God has told us he is lonely and he wants to feel appreciated. I think in us, he sees the chance to “do” for someone without being told…taking care of the trash, putting up my clothesline. I think that God has put that in each one of us…the need to both care and do for someone else without expectation of return. And it’s in that caring and doing, that we are most like Jesus.

As Orlando would complete each “leg” of the line, I would hang some clothes on it, smile as if it were the best thing ever and thank him profusely. In turn, Orlando would smile from ear to ear and look admiringly at his handiwork. When it was all said and done, I had three new lengths of clothesline strung under the veranda roof, a husband who learned that sometimes the way we can best serve is to let someone else serve us and an eccentric Orlando who hobbled home a little taller that day. The bully next door has truly become our caretaker. And as far as how my veranda looks with clothesline strung all over it…it looks heavenly!