All Things Profane and Sacred

I'm thinking today about a guy I worked with back in high school. For some reason everyone I worked with called me Miss Amber (none of the other ladies were called Miss anything so I'm not sure what was up with that), so I called everyone Mr. (or Miss) First Name Here. It made me feel vaguely like I was living in a Joseph Conrad short story (Mistuh Kurtz? He dead.).

Anyhow, this particular guy's name was Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig was all mechanical and would fix your car up on the cheap, so long as you sat and talked with him while he did it. Now this may seem like a fair trade for getting your brakes done for $5 a side, but until you spend 6 hours listening to a guy explain in detail how your brake system works you cannot truely understand the trade off involved.

He spent the season working in the cranberry bogs and the rest of the year supplimenting his income with odd jobs about town. It's the sort of living you can afford when you live in a small town. While he may not have been the most sparkling human to walz through the galaxy, he was a really decent human being. The value (and number) of quietly good people shouldn't be underestimated.