Copyright Kirsi Reinikka 2016
He was a former neighbour from down the road. A feather-weight ex-boxer and II WW marksman whose face looked like mossy rock with nodules. He had an old, greasy, loyal (as they come) German shepherd, and he slept in his garage, its door wide open. You could see the top of his head lying on the pillow from the road. He drove a plum colour car that was falling apart. You could hardly see him behind the wheel. He said he wasn´t worried about losing his licence because he didn´t have one.
He had two obsessions that I knew of. There might have been a few more, I suspect, but these two were down right obvious to everyone who saw his house and yard. He loved tiling driveways, floors and walls. He liked bathroom and kitchen wall type of tiles. The garage walls were a circus of tiles. He would go to the local tile shops and bargain for free end-of-pile tiles. The sales people knew him by name. I know this because I took him tile shopping once.
His second passion was roses. He had a curvy flower bench around the corner of his block. Boy, were there roses! Spindly, long-stemmed, rambling, jagged, red, orange, pink, white, mostly leafless but full of buds and blooms when the flowering time came around.
I can still see him afternoon napping in his garage, surrounded by the hundreds of mundane tiles and heavenly scent of roses. If he was still here he would give me cuttings. I am sure of it.
