1.

"It's de only way," he said to me, this marvelous old timepiece of a man, looming over me as I knelt in the impossibly narrow shower stall of a rat-nasty first floor oceanfront condo, which faced the wrong way (difficult as it must have been for the presiding architect to figure out where the ocean lay). The condo overlooked a tadpole-nirvana marsh that wafted forth some specific sweet sewer-brine almost-to-the-ocean smell that one's sensory apparatus, once having known, can never forget. Within the apartment were several small greasy windows. These had been thrown wide to embrace the marsh as one might a lover, just returned from the selfsame ocean the windows had never known. Perhaps, a metaphor of things to come. Perhaps they would just need a thorough cleaning. For his part, the man before me appeared to be the very last of a once-great race of men predating our own, possessing a low shuffling speech: a strange Lovecraftian combination of either Yiddish or Polish mixed with Tolkein's own dwarvish. Again he spoke to me, and I was compelled to hear his words.

I had been at cleaning this barnacle of an apartment for five hours running, and yet in deference to the weight of understanding that comes from a life lived in such great measure, I stopped my scrubbing, and listened.

"See there, you've got to getcher to a plumber," the fantastically ancient one intoned down, more or less to me. "Looker at thash rust! Got to get a new, uh...what you mercall it, shiny-type thing, drain thing, ogleychromeation...[yog-sothoth! etc.] --new onennadose, but little bit weiyder, see? Put that in, cover the rust. See? Only way." I nodded emphatically upward while cursing the phenomenon of hard water stains-upon-tile in every language I knew. I didn't have nearly enough curses to get the job done.

And then suddenly I had the most amazing flash of strangeness I'd ever known. This man, this incredible human being who had lived so many more days and eaten so much more food than me, slept so many more times and spoken so many many more words than I have ever even thought, believes that the removal of a thread-width ring of rust from around the drain of a sink in the crackerjack box-bathroom of a bottomfeeder condo that his son-in-law owns, rust which also HE WILL PROBABLY NEVER AGAIN SEE IN HIS LIFE, is of such great import that he is willing to repeat it to me, again and again. Me, a man a quarter of his age, crouching like a primitive hunter-gatherer in the shower, wiping grout as though if I ceased for the briefest instant it would be decreed, as by some ancient law, that my balls should be physically separated from my body. And all in a vain effort to please this man, a stone-cold last ditch push to show him the extent to which I respected his every will and testament. And again he repeated to me, that this MUST be made right. Further, he has realized there is only ONE correct way to proceed, and that, specifically, it must be a PLUMBER, a man whose job is so holy and true that only he may attend to the vile rust that plagueth and vexeth us so.

But I'm getting a little dramatic here.

To be clear: I realized that at that moment, rust-nothingness was nothing less than the primary concern in this man's great and storied life.

For my part, I crouched in the shower like a Norsk bjergtrolde and gazed upward at the wrinkled face of absolute concern. This beautiful man would have his plumber, I vowed. As I lived and breathed, let all the gods bear witness--yet unto my grave I may go!--it would be so. I should see to it ere I pass over to the halls of my kinsmen, lo-there-do-I-see-my-father.

Abruptly, another voice rang out and I was spared doing any such thing. Ethel, mother and crone, proud matriarch and wife that she was, had lost an earring. Or perhaps merely thought that she had. At any rate, the man, whose name I never quite caught but sounded something like Grundchen, or the Yiddish equivalent, went out to see to his lady and I was left alone again. I pondered, scrubbing also. Scruondered is perhaps an adequate term for my action just then. I thought about my own life, having been conceived, raised, grown, studied, understood and misunderstood, loved, been loved, hurt, been hurt etc. and always awed by it all. And I thought, after 28 seasons now, and 28 more, and 28 more, perhaps I too will one day care about rust as much. Perhaps I will have no choice in the matter.

There, alone in the shower, it was a chilling revelation.