I bundled up for the trip down to the lobby at Big Pink, hoping to see Rhonda, the generous den mother to the 700 of us who live in this large dusty mauve building.

Leo the Engineer was at the desk, and periodically speaking in Spanglish on the walky-talky mode on his phone. I greeted him enthusiastically, first encounter of the New Year and all that, and I value the fact that Leo is a professional who stays on top of the physical plant and has- for the most part- kept the lights on, which his predecessor did not.

Kelly had inherited the job from his old man, who had been here since Christ was a Corporal and Frances Freed, the owner of all of Buckingham she could survey, was alive and in her second floor office over in the strip mall on North Glebe Road. Kelly’s approach to pro-active maintenance was mostly to sit around and wait for things to break.

If he had been a ship-driver in the Navy the building would have sunk at the pier.

Anyway, we high-fived in between squawks from the device in his hand. “What’s happenin’, Leo?” I asked, doing a chest bump with the stocky engineer.

“Life is good, Bubbie. Found a busted pipe this morning. That cold snap is the most amazing thing I have seen in years.”

“What? Damn, what happened?”

“Extremely cold Polar Vortex swept down out of the Arctic….”

“No, not that. What happened here?”

“Hah- got you, Vic! Exposed section froze in the uptakes for the convectors and then burst. I found it about one in the morning. I was able to identify the blockage and route around it and kept the heat on. There was water and ice everywhere.”

“Jesus, we could have been flooded out!”

“Yeah, it could have flooded all the way down from the 8th floor in a frozen messy cascade. And no heat.”

“Holy smokes,” I said. “I am glad you were on top of that.”

“I have 700 people to take care of here. That is why I live here too. I only had eight calls on the heat being out, so we got it covered over night and I have a repair crew here this morning.”

“It would have been colder than crap,” I said, making an imaginary exaggerated shiver. “Some of the older folks could have frozen.”

“That is why I live here, Bubbie. Johnnie on the spot, Man.”

“Leo, people don’t understand what you do for us. There were people all over the region that had busted pipes and frozen pipes and couldn’t cook or even flush the toilets. And some were trying to unfreeze them with blow-torches and burning down their houses.”

“A stitch in time…” said Leo, and then raised the walkie-talky to his mouth. “Pepe, decir aquellos contratistas que tener cuidado con las tuberías.”

Pepe said something back I didn’t catch, and I gave Leo a bear-hug. “Thanks for keeping us safe and warm, Leo. You da Man.”

“Just one of them,” he said. “And wait. The cold is going to be back. Anything new with you?”

“Brrr.” I replied. “New Beverage Manager at Willow, and she is cute.”

“Then life is good, right, Amigo?”

“Bueno, Leo. La vida es muy buena. Usted es mi héroe!”

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303