When I lived in Mazatlan and Ernesto was my handyman, he often asked his friend, Huesos, to help him on jobs that required a strong back and an extra set of hands. Huesos means “bones” in Spanish. That’s his nickname because, although he is strong, he is exceptionally skinny.
Huesos comes from a wealthy family. His father paid for him to go to private schools in Mazatlán and to dental school in the U.S. But Huesos wasn’t cut out to be a dentist. He would have preferred to be a veterinarian. Or a gardener. Or anything other than a dentist.
The whole time I knew him, Huesos lived with an odd assortment of wild dogs in a homemade shelter on the hill behind my house. When he needed money, he rang my doorbell to see if I had work for him. I often hired him to sweep the courtyard and Neto looked for him whenever he needed a helper who was willing and good-natured. Huesos was both.
One day Neto and Huesos were nearly arrested taking chunks of concrete to the dump. It happened at the end of a long day, after they loaded more than a ton of concrete pieces into the back of Neto’s brother’s pickup truck. Back and forth they went, from my house to the dump, carrying load after load of heavy concrete.
On the last trip to the dump, Neto spotted a man who had a huge hole in his front yard. He stopped the truck and made a deal with the man. Instead of going all the way to the dump, Neto would give him the broken pieces of concrete to fill the hole and the man would be happy.
They started to unload concrete into the hole when the police arrived. The policeman told Neto that someone made an “environmental complaint” against him for dumping concrete. The policeman was going to take both Neto and Huesos to jail and impound the truck. Neto was not eager to go to jail and he was especially unhappy about the truck, since it wasn’t his.
Neto told the policeman he had 100 pesos (about $10.00 U.S. at the time) in his pocket and asked if he could just pay the fine right there. The policeman said that since there were two policemen on duty, the fine would be 200 pesos. If the workers didn’t have the money, they would have to go to jail.
Neto then remembered that he did, indeed, have 200 pesos in his pocket. So he paid the policeman, dumped the concrete in the man’s front yard and everyone was happy.
Sometimes it is Life’s unexpected moments of good fortune that lead to the most happiness.