The padres care for all people.

Mom said that often about them. And the padres did care for all people: the poor, wealthy, under-educated, brilliant, and especially those who had experienced loss. All binaries, it seemed. A symmetrical mix of all manners of people—and of the truly lost and desperate.

My brothers and I would walk to school past the padres' church. Next to the church was the house where the padres and these desperate people lived. Dad always talked about how he had wanted to be a priest but didn't have the tolerance and wouldn't have been able to quell a family's pain at their child's funeral.

We were devout Catholics, enough so that my parents never drank or cursed. These sins simply weren’t allowed in our home. However, that vow of verbal chastity didn’t seem to leak down to my three brothers. They each had the mouth of a stevedore, and fucker seemed to be their favorite word when not around our parents. I, the youngest and the only girl, never uttered that word, until now that is, to tell you this tale about my brother Jimmy and Padre Diaz.

It was the early ‘70s, and fucker was the word of the hippies, a carryover from the jazz era, my brother Timmy hypothesized. Jimmy and Bobby also said it. They more than just said the word; they growled it out and fetishized it. And like anything new with those three boys, it got the hell beat out of it, and eventually that word went the way of psychedelic music and Ford Pintos. But when my brothers got into a fad they wore it out raucously and deliciously. It was fine entertainment.

Twelve years old that year, Jimmy was the middle one, by far the craziest, and certainly the gutsiest. Those idiosyncrasies often translated into some variety of tumult, which, because of our home’s adjacency to the padres and their guests, usually involved the word fucker.

The unfortunate target of Jimmy’s adolescent creativity was, without exception, Padre Diaz, a portly septuagenarian with horn-rimmed glasses and a kind, tired face. From coating the padre’s bicycle in motor oil to filling his penny-loafers with spoiled egg salad, Jimmy had his number. I think what fueled my sibling wisenheimer was the way the padre would storm up our driveway, tottering his chubby body, completely exasperated, firing off bible passages in Spanish about why Jimmy should stop and why he was going to be standing in the corner in Heaven. This marvelous display of animation was so entertaining that the padre had no idea he was perpetuating his own specific variant of hell. That is until one afternoon when Jimmy, Bobby, and I were walking past the priests’ yard, and Padre Diaz was out near the sidewalk tending to yellow begonias with one of his guests.

I could see the rumble in Jimmy’s volcano as he immediately dropped his book bag, ran over, and flipped the padre’s glasses off his face. Padre Diaz stood up, shook his tight fist toward the blue sky, and shouted, “Knock it off, you little fucker!” We all three stopped dead in our shoes, with wide eyes and gaped mouths. An obese smile quickly thickened across Jimmy’s face.

“Yeah! Way to go, Padre!” he yelled.

Padre Diaz turned away toward the begonias, attempting to cover his own big grin on that day, the last day Jimmy ever terrorized him.

Three years later, at Jimmy's funeral, Padre Diaz performed the service and told everyone how Jimmy had taught him things that no one else had been able to. He told my family how God had sent Jimmy to him and how lucky God was to have Jimmy home again. And how fortunate we were to be able to give that gift to God.

Padre Diaz grinned at me, Timmy, and Bobby when he said to the entire congregation, with teary eyes, his final words about Jimmy: “I sure loved that little fucker.”