If love is not the sum of my every day, it’s what I add to every day, or I don’t know love. At large in the world, seeking nothing but a chance, I materialize where small insufficiencies require me. Wherever a shopping cart rolls rudderless through a parking lot, there the fixer will be to steer it to the return pen and make neat rows of all the carts. When cashiers ask Do you have eight cents, the fixer is there with change. The fixer is there to help you reach, to find your dog, to make room for you in the endless line of cars going nowhere, running out of gas. He carries a gas can, does the fixer, and road flares and a shovel. When someone has shoveled you out, you have the fixer to thank. Don’t bother. Your appreciation is thanks enough, unless you can help find the fixer a woman who loves him better. Consider his plight. Not every woman appreciates being fixed, or being thought to need fixing, day in and day out, and yet he can’t stop trying to fix. We live in a time when it’s easy to misconstrue a magnanimous heart—the incident of the girls in the park being one particularly regrettable example, though instructive. As everyone eventually understood, someone might have mistaken their uninhibited play for enticement if I hadn’t intervened. To put it simply, it’s hard to find someone with whom to share the fixer’s life. I’ve tried to help her see how little changes of attitude now, pay dividends over time. I’ve tried to bestow, anticipating nothing in return. The love of the fixer is lonely love. Rather than risk going home, he takes another tour of the shopping center to see what needs to be done.

Copyright © July 12, 2007 David Hodges