He repeats it with patient conviction to anyone who will stand still long enough: you enter this world without a shirt on your back, and you depart the same way. If there is food on your plate three times a day and cloth against your skin, you have already received more than you deserve and ought to keep quiet. He delivers this as a law of nature, as if all other human cravings were character flaws.
People nod when he speaks. They say he must be a man of rare spirituality, an upright figure who moves among us as though he’s already forgiven our everyday sins.
What we also know: he owns the supermarket on the corner where the fluorescent lights whir from dawn until midnight. Two restaurants whose menus expand each year. A department store in the mall where people wander for hours, filling carts with things they didn’t know they needed.
If there’s a word he’d choose for himself, it would be this: enlightened.