He s got this sticker-covered cart, filled with the tools of his trade, that he pushes all day long as he polices his little corner of the world. It is, without doubt, the cleanest strip mall parking lot in all of Miami-Dade. Some of us have taken to picking up the occasional bumper sticker along our travels for him and he always finds some place for them. All the good ones get the permanent spot on the body of the cart, the rest on the moveable garbage cans, and some even on the bright orange traffic control cones that he uses when he has some detailed work to do on a parking spot. But it is the actual frame of the cart that holds the jewels of the collection.
Funny thing is, that the best spot of all is empty, no bumper sticker.
Just some fading words scrawled there with a penknife by a hand maybe not comfortable with either the words or the language, they read Freedom for Elian . El viejo likes to talk sometimes, he lets me buy him a cup of caf when we do, and he likes his cigars. He used to swear that there weren t any good cigars anymore, used to that is until the day he became a citizen, and I brought him a hand rolled one from my cigar joint. He still talks about that one. He became a citizen just a few months ago, twenty-some odd years after being eligible to take the oath, he took it last fall, I had occasion to sit and talk with him for quite some time as he smoked his congratulatory cigar the day after the citizenship ceremony.