My rewrite - Ed and I

As of now, I feel like I want to rewrite my first essay, "Ed and I".  This topic probably was the one that I was most excited to write about at the start, but it did not come out at all like I had hoped.  I had so many things bouncing around my head, so many great ideas and examples to use, that the entire paper ended up like a mesh of memories with no overall purpose.  I am not satisfied with my work on this paper.
Ed changed me in a few ways.  First, he opened me up to the idea that there are people that I can have a healthy, beneficial friendship with from all different walks of life.  Living so close to potentially dangerous parts of Detroit for all my life, I originally thought that it would be hard to find commonalities between people who lived there and people who lived in Grosse Pointe, which was a completely kind of place.  Even though we tended to discuss things that I would never bring up in conversation with a coworker - gun ranges, drugs, crime, sex - I eventually found myself really enjoying his presence and learning from him in a positive way.  Learning from him was never something that I would have expected to do at the beginning of the summer.  Another way he changed me was by showing me that even people who look like the worst role models can have something to teach.  Meeting Ed and spending a majority of my time with him at work actually gave the "don't judge a book by its cover" cliche a real world example.  This is the influence on me that I wanted to get across in my paper, but it didn't show through clearly enough.
The piece by David Sedaris that we read in class before the paper was due really inspired me to focus on exmamples and show rather than tell the readers about the influence a character has.  I think I might have overdone my attempts at "showing", however, and included far to little to help my audience understand.  In my attempts to write a paper about Ed, I ended up just giving example after example, expecting the readers to understand my thought process.  In this revision, I really hope to make it clear how meeting Ed changed me, not just through examples of his surprising behavior, but through how it made me feel.