There's a man who works in my office named Carlos. He runs Office Services--unsung heroes of maintenance, repairs and supplies. He is one of the most loveable guys, very freindly and very genuine. You meet him and you feel a little sad because you know that someday his family won't have him in their lives anymore. He makes me think of my dad. Carlos doesn't look like he's close to retirement but I think he probably is. Black people age so well, it's impossible to tell how old they are. But I have a feeling that he's older than he looks, and we'll lose him to retirement soon. Did you know that some huge percentage of people die about two years after retirement? That just raises too many intresting questions to get into. My father retired a couple years ago. It's the strangest thing. He's always been healthy apart from his hips and his knees. I mean, the man never missed a day of work and when he got sick it was always for about a day. But I've always worried that I was going to lose him before his time.

One day I decided to find out if I could get the company I work for to donate a video projector to the Neo-Futurists. I decided to ask Carlos if he knew where I should start asking. He said he had some broken projectors that he kept around for spare parts and he could build one for me. Just like that. And then a few weeks later my theater company had a video projector. It made a lot of projects possible and a lot of Neo-Futurists happy. And Carlos doesn't know a thing about the Neo-Futurists. He just did it because I asked.

I don't think that I thanked him enough. I think I meant to buy him a card or send him something but didn't. Getting me to even think about something like a card is a feat in and of itself.

I've probably worried about my father all these years because we have a pretty distant relationship. I'm an artist. He belongs to IBEW. I'm a liberal. He's a conservative. The list goes on, and as the years do, I worry about worry. I don't want to find myself trying desperately to make a connection but failing, looking for those last words to share when he's lying in a hospital bed. I don't want to worry over the card I never sent or the gift I never sent or the thing I never said.

I don't always say hi to Carlos, but Carlos always says 'hi' to me and when he does, he wakes me up and I remember good things, like happy moods and honest people. One day, I spilled some coffee on my way to my desk. I put my cup down at my desk and then went back to clean it up. Carlos was busy in the cafeteria and noticed me leave and then come back. He stopped what he was doing and said "hey, Andy. Why not do what everyone else does and just leave it for somebody else to trip on?" It was a compliment. It was a good deed gone noticed when I had no interest in getting attention.

Good people just do it for me. If I could be remembered that way, I'd be ready to die myself.