Luck
I was on my way to violin class yesterday when I spotted the local locksmith, an elderly man I haven’t seen around in ages, at his tiny corner shop on my street. He was clearing things out.
“I’m retiring,” he told me when I asked him what he was doing. “Clearing out all this old stuff. I’m done.”
When I told him I was having some trouble with the lock I bought from him nearly 15 years ago, however, he said, “Let’s go take a look. That lock shouldn’t be broken this soon. It was built to last.” He remembered exactly what make and model he’d sold me all those years ago, when I’d first moved into the Water Curtain Cave.
We went up, and he borrowed a can of WD40, spraying into the lock at various expert angles, and soon enough it was working like new again. “If you’d gone to any other locksmith they would have told you it was broken beyond repair and made you get a new one,” he told me. “It was lucky you ran into me today! I won’t be answering calls from now on.”
I tried to offer him money, but he refused. “You’re the photographer who took those photos of the fruitseller next door’s kids. It’s on the house!” Cool.
When I first moved in, I thought that that little triangle of illegal, ramshackle houses by the bridge in Bitan was an eyesore, and would be much nicer as a park, as the city government designated it long ago. But over the years I’ve come to know many of the shop owners and people who live and work there, and I’ve come to appreciate the community, although I still wish they could live somewhere without the ever-present threat of eviction, somewhere with a little more security and safety. Still, much of this society works, after a fashion, on the very existence of this grey area in between legal and illegal. The entire nation, in fact, seems to exist here. So without that, we’re all out of luck. And we need all we can get.
