Caretaker Carlos - 8/29/09

I caught up with Carlos as he was hurrying through the parking garage just like I had a thousand times before. The building was doing it again, and it reminded me to ask him. The pipes were making this intermittent, high-pitched, wail of a sound that had been going on day and night for about a week. You could hear it all the way from my third floor apartment to the first floor parking garage. It would last for about 30-40 seconds and then it would trail off. “Hey, Carlos, do you hear that?” I asked him. “That’s an awful noise, what is that?” He smiled his usual impish grin and said, “That? Oh yeah, we put a monkey in the wall!” Once again Carlos had made me laugh, and had also told me, in his wonderful way, that he would get to it and have it fixed on Monday when he got back after the weekend. Carlos always got to it, and Carlos always got it fixed! But, Monday never came. Monday was instead the day that we all heard the worst news anyone of us could have imagined. Carlos had died in a deep-sea diving accident over the weekend and he wouldn’t be coming back. That was it. That was the news. To say the residents of this big old lumbering apartment building on Screenland Drive were stunned would be an understatement. We all knew him and loved him! He was our Carlos! The one who could fix anything! The one who had cleaned our carpets, changed our light bulbs, stopped our leaks, polished our hallways, got us new garbage disposals, hung our blinds, installed our lamps, supervised the gardeners, hosed our garage, lit and unlit our pilot lights, directed the painters, climbed up on the roof and reset our air conditioners… You name it, Carlos did it, and always, always with a joke and a laugh. He knew every inch of this building with its 100+ units, and I think that even the building, itself, loved Carlos.

Carlos was my friend. Now, I am happily blessed with many, many friends, but Carlos was my everyday friend. When I moved into this giant ship of a building 6 years ago Carlos was one of the first people I met, and when someone works where you live you tend to see them all the time. So, I got to really know Carlos. I got to know his family, starting with his beautiful wife Ayde, and then his 3 kids that he was so proud of, Hayde, Carlito, and Sandra. Finally, the love of his life these last couple of years, his two year old grand daughter Tenicia. But, there were things that I didn’t know about Carlos, like his love of deep-sea diving. How did I miss that? I knew that he had studied like crazy and had earned his American Citizenship a couple of years back, but I didn’t know that he was 44, or that he had started work here as the caretaker of this building the first day the place opened 20 years ago. I did know that he loved to hunt and fish, and I had met his Mother and his sister Maria, but I had never been to his house…

Carlos, my everyday friend, I miss you so dearly already. We all do. I realized the other night lying awake in my bed listening to the unfixed wail in the wall again and again, that Carlos had been wrong about that. There wasn’t a monkey in the wall, but rather this big old lumbering apartment building had somehow known that it was going to lose its precious caretaker, the only one it had ever known, and the building itself, had simply started to cry.