(or rather, the man who built it)
This is a story about a bookshelf… but really, it’s about the man who installed it.
For privacy, we’ll change his name and how we met. Let’s call him Pedro.
Today, he was standing in my new apartment, ready to install a wall mounted bookshelf I’d been dreaming about. Four uneven shelves on the wall facing my sofa. I wanted them intentionally imperfect: some to the left, some to the right.
“Laura” he said, measuring with his leveler, “I need you nearby because I want to be sure I install it exactly where you’d like it.”
So I sat on the sofa, watching him measure, adjust, and re measure. Pedro is a perfectionist, the kind who measures twice before even marking the wall. I showed him a picture of what I wanted and said, “You know… It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
What I really meant was: I’m learning to let go.
(He doesn’t need to know that. There’s too much buried under those words, too many details, too much vulnerability to unpack.)
As he worked, the conversation unfolded the way it often does when people are doing something with their hands, completely unguarded and I asked him how he learned to do what he does.
He paused, then looked at me and said, “To explain that, I’d have to tell you my whole story.”
And so he did.
The Streets
Pedro grew up in Central America. His mom passed away when he was seven. His father, an alcoholic, left by the time he was ten. He and his brothers ended up living on the streets.
“That’s where my story really started,” he said.
He began working young, doing whatever he could: deliveries, reselling things on sidewalks. Nobody taught him the value of money, but survival does that for you, it teaches urgency.
When you’re ten years old and the world abandons you, you either collapse or become resourceful beyond your years. Pedro became the latter.
One day, a woman told him she could help him make extra money. Naïve and hopeful, he followed. He was ten. What happened next was something no child should ever experience. He told me the story in fragments, not for pity, but as fact, as something that shaped him.
“This was the first time I saw a woman naked,” he said quietly. “I didn’t understand what was happening. I froze. Then I screamed.”
He described it with a level of self awareness you rarely come by, not dramatized, just truthful. “That moment” he said, “was traumatic. It changed something in me.”
I decided not to interrupt. Some stories ask for silence, not sympathy.
The Fighter
After that, Pedro became angry, at life, at authority figures, at the world. Between 11 and 13, he fought constantly. Fistfights were his language, his only defense. Then one day, during one of those neighborhood fights, a well known local boxer passed by. He watched them fight, then later approached Pedro and his friends.
“You have potential” he told them. “If you’re going to fight, learn to fight right.”
So he began to train them: discipline, form, the “nine ways of boxing,” as he called it. Pedro said the training changed him.
“It helped” he said. “Slowly, I stopped being so angry all the time.”
It wasn’t just the boxing that healed him, it was the structure, the mentorship, the realization that even chaos has purpose if you learn how to make sense of it.
The Lifeguard
One day at a lake, he learned to swim. Not long after, he found himself saving a boy from drowning.
He smiled when he told me that part.
“That day” he said, “I thought maybe my purpose was to save others.”
So he became a salvavidas (a lifeguard) and later joined the Red Cross. For a few years, that was his world: responding and rescuing.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll feel what’s beneath the surface.
A life that began in abandonment, left to survive on the streets, forced to make something of himself was now finding meaning in saving others from drowning. The same boy who had no one to pull him out was spending his life making sure someone else didn’t sink.
People like him, they don’t fight for or rescue others by accident.
Healers, saviors, the ones who rebuild, we’re just trying to make peace with the same story from a different angle.
Today, Pedro gets restless easily. He moved on. Got married, worked in construction, learned to handle heavy machinery: cranes, forklifts, anything that could move or build. Eventually, he left Honduras and came here.
He started driving trucks, transporting cargo across highways: materials, equipment, the backbone of trade that keeps things moving in our lovely yet complicated country. And then, somewhere along the way, he found himself again in what he does now: fixing, building, repairing. A handyman by trade, a craftsman by nature.
As we finished the conversation, I asked what he does outside of work. What he enjoys when he’s not fixing things and he laughed. “Laura, I can’t really stay still” he said. “I like being home, but I’m always fixing something. My wife loves the beach, but I can’t be there more than half an hour. It’s beautiful, but I need to stay busy. I’m happiest when I’m working with my hands.”
Maybe this is his peace (and distraction). To build, to repair, to create order out of chaos and in the process, to tell his story without shame.
The Shelf (and also the end of this story)
By the time Pedro finished the bookshelf, it was exactly what I’d imagined. Uneven, imperfect, and beautiful.
He stepped back, inspecting his work. I smiled. “It’s perfect” I said.
He laughed. “But you said you didn’t want it perfect.”
Maybe that’s what this is all about. Some stories live in the things we build. Whether that’s uneven shelves or a man’s story from abandonment to self redemption, from anger to grace. From sleeping on streets to building a life in another country.
A shelf meant to hold the books that in some ways built me: Invisible Women, Plato’s Republic, Fighting Monsters, Humane Leadership. Each one a fragment of who I’ve become, lessons that shaped how I think.
I sit on my sofa now, writing this, looking at those books. They live inside me and they couldn’t have found their place here, not without Pedro, maybe not without his entire life’s story.
Maybe the world really is all intertwined somehow? Not in the neat, “pre destined” way people like to believe, but in the messy, ever shifting kind. A string of imperfect circumstances, constantly happening and unfolding like a domino effect.
One life set off a chain of events that, somehow years later, led him here, drilling holes into my wall and telling me about the first time he learned to swim.
Life. The butterfly effect, if you believe in that sort of thing.
But that’s a conversation for another day.
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