Pablo Tamayo is moving today, to stay with his brother-in-law on Nueces Street till he can find another house. "Don't worry so much," he told me over the fence. "I'm a beat-up man, my wife is an old lady, I always told you the roof was gonna fall."

That's wrong. He never mentioned the roof. He used to call on the telephone and say in a gruff voice, "Who's there?" as if I'd called him. When I stuttered, he'd laugh and say, "This is me, I'm standing on your roof," but he never mentioned it falling.

I want to give him eggs, a flannel shirt. I want to tell him this neighborhood will be a vacuum without him. To go back to the beginning, make a catalog of his utterances since the day we met over the bamboo that divides our yards. I was standing on a ladder with clippers, trying to tell the bamboo who was boss. In the next yard he stooped over a frizzy dog, murmuring Spanish consolations. He looked like he might once have been a wrestler. "So," he said, looking up. "You're pretty tall, I guess." I told him I was his new neighbor and he said he was my old one. He pointed, "Look at how I put this eyeball back in my dog."