The night before last I was sitting on the couch with my nightly glass of wine watching Bravo by myself because Shannon was at her Tuesday book club. I heard a knock on the window behind my head so I looked out and saw my neighbor whom I knew of but had never met. He is a reclusive man known to many in the neighbor by the eighteen year old Pinto he drives at a rate of 15 miles per hour up and down our little street. The Pinto is what he was knocking about because he had inavertantly left the thing in neutral with his two dogs inside while he ran into his house to grab something. The car rolled down the hill towards our house but was stopped by a large ditch and several trees. He asked me in a round about way to help him get his car out, so he could go to WalMart for some food. We spent about an hour pushing the car from every angle but it just would not budge. He is not a regular conversationalist so I filled in the cracks by asking him if he had been painting. This took him off guard because he wondered how I knew he was a painter. My boss the glass artist tried to buy one of his paintings once but the whole deal fell through when someone told the him he could get more money somewhere else. At work there was a photo of one of his paintings that mysteriously disapeared after the deal fell through.

After much wrestling under, over, and sideways, we got the bright idea to use a chain to pull the car out by hooking it up to my truck. We got the car out and he asked me if I wanted to see his new painting, which of course I jumped at the chance. We had to enter the house through a window. He yelled at his dogs in Russian and put them in a side room. Everything in the house looked very antique, stuff was piled in every corner of the shack which is heated by a fire place and I am willing to bet has no running water. He dashed out of the room for a minute and came back with the painting: a mountain scene on a small canvas. Every leaf was painted in full detail. Millions of little pointalistic-like dashes of paint made up the brightly colored scene. It had random figures walking down a road. The small painting contained the only color in the whole room which made for a stark contrast. I asked him how many he had produced and he said he had been working on this one for a year. I asked him if he had sold many and he said he only gets a third of the selling price, and that he lives a hard life. I believe he may be autistic, he doesn't communicate like most, he lives alone except for his dogs. He is a very interesting man.