The Artful Trade

This is a story of broken bodies and imperfect love, of ancient music and unexpected courage, and of the rare, fleeting moment.. a thin place, when a veil lifts and we glimpse something holy rising from the cracks. A Thin Place In Ireland, you might hear them quietly mentioned after Mass or whispered in a pub, like a secret almost too fragile to say out loud. The Irish call them 'thin places.' Those moments where the ordinary and the sacred seem to collide. They are the cracks between world that surrounds us and something just beyond our reach…a momentary fracture in the everyday that allows something holy to spill thru. Years ago, traveling alone through the west of Ireland, I stumbled upon such a place. I was in the small Irish village of Dungloe. It was Sunday morning and I was waiting for a bus to Dublin. Mass had just let out and as the pews emptied I noticed everyone headed for the local town hall. As it turned out that day was the finals for the step dancing ...

He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up. He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs. There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants, which means they answer phones, smile till their jaws hurt and grind their teeth at night with worry that they don't belong, and never will, on this side of the river. Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. The girls tell themselves a man’s lingering presence means 'I need you' or 'only you can save me.' It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife.Or I’m tired of the harangue of living. It means I’m tired of the way...

The Work of the Living Sometimes on a Friday night in August, all any working man wants is the small and fleeting mercy of a dark bar and a cold beer. John Dalton nodded to the woman with tired eyes, on the barstool next to him. When she didn’t reply, he shrugged and smiled. "I’m John. I work at the auto body place, down Valdosta." The silence swallowed his sentence then seemed to echo for a moment between them. He tried again. "I started there a few years back thinking it was just paycheck for a while. You know how that goes." She glanced at him. He was handsome in a common way, the memory of a younger man trapped in an avalanche of advancing gray. Blue collar trim, but the center of him had moved lower the way it sometimes does in a man. But Katie Dowling could see there was something else. Something damaged, like sea salt on a paint job. Something slightly battered that hung in his eyes. She recognized it. She saw it every night in the mirror. That dente...

That last night before she left I went home and stripped. And I scrubbed at my skin and then at my heart trying to wash away the doubt. In the morning I put her bag on the bus and we stood alone in the shadows. The bus driver, an old Indian with eyes that had watched a thousand goodbyes gently said, “All aboard Miss. Got to get gone now.” She started to cry. I wanted to say something about trying to do something right in a world full of wrong, about courage and what it demands. About the ache that crawls inside and attaches itself forever. But I said nothing. She looked up into my eyes one last time and blinked back the tears then she reached out and gripped my hand, feeling for the scar and what was true between us. Got to get gone . . . Then the bus carrying all I knew of love moved away down Old Hope Road. - - - I walked onto the job site out by the county line to pick up my last paycheck. Some brickers were working on the second story of some office building that would ne...

Before Dabo ever touched a violin he heard music. He heard it in the sound of his father’s shoes scraping against the apartment stairs coming home each night. He heard it in his mother’s worried eyes when she was sure his midwinter wheeze was pneumonia and in the click of the radiator when the salvation of warmth finally forced its way up the pipes. At his window in the early morning he heard it in the echo of horse hooves and the clink of milkmen’s glass bottles as they rocked over the cobblestones of Jewish Warsaw. All of it sang to Michelska Gabriel Dabowsky before he ever played a note. A phantom sound that played in the back of him. But it waited far beneath his ears rising only in his dreams before receding with each day. It was always some whisper of a melody, sad but sweet too. And timid, as though it knew it could exist only in the shadows. The first time Dabo heard a bow on a string he felt a larger part of himself, an unheard part, suddenly speaking. When he was 16...

True Love and Monsters explains the physics of love...about that first flight,about its gravity—how it lifts us when we're young and grounds as we age. It follows a runaway teen who learns to fly on blacktop courts and whisper salvation through summer screens, only to discover that some hearts can’t be saved, and that love, over time, doesn’t get lighter—it gets truer, and heavier. It explores how hope changes, how heartbreak transforms, and how the monsters we fear most sometimes appear wearing our own faces. It asks what it means to fly and to love deeply when the fall is all but guaranteed. And why we keep doing it anyway. - - - The Year I Learned to Fly When you’re 17 all love is still true. There are no false notes in you yet. No irretrievable mistakes, no years long dead ends or unforgiven sins to carry. Hope is still like wet concrete that has not yet started to harden into rationale and excuse. Faith, in yourself and what you feel, though hidden, is still as c...

Lucky Dog The church sign read, “Trouble is just a rest stop on the way to Good.” The paint had cracked and faded and one of the Os had begun to disappear, which made the sign seem even more like a prayer. That road had been trouble since the county had surveyed the bypass then paved it. The town folk avoided it after it took four teenagers that first year on a blind curve. The church people were certain though it meant their souls had found their way to Good or to God. Depending on their faith or their spelling. That night the rain was hard and a flatbed slowed then stopped on the curve. The door opened and a man pushed a dog out onto the shoulder. He didn’t say that he was tired of cleaning up after one more puppy or that dog food cost too damn much. Instead he whispered to himself that terrible is a rest stop on the way to good, like the sign said. Then the man slammed the door, the engine muttered and the tail lights, just like the man’s conscience, slipped away into darknes...

Light and the City The beggar was unshaven and even at 100 degrees wore an overcoat. But the old man, always gauging hidden worth, felt something else. Something rare, something valuable. Dabo stood silent, eyes down, humbled and uncertain. Three months on the street had hardened his features but softened his eyes. Forfet felt something else in him. His business was listening to lies. “She don’t need this ring,” or “He’s finally got a job if we can just make it to the end of the month,” or “Just take it, I never loved her anyway.” His currency was the lies that people tell themselves just to get through one more week or month or year. And so he could not help but feel the truth whenever it stumbled into his shop. Some things, he knew, can’t help but tell the truth. Small children, old dogs and drunks. Truth, he knew, has a tone, undeniable as a church bell. And now looking at this beggar before him, Forfet could feel that low tolling resonance, incapable of misrepresenting...

When A Songwriter Dies They come in uhauls dragging their hopes and heartaches. They come on Greyhounds with a bus ticket and a beat up guitar and the address of a friend that has a couch. They come with the certainty of sinners at salvation's gate. Sure that the right musical confession sung with just the right amount of hope and regret will swing the doors open. So they squeeze their talent until the last drop finds its way into their choruses. The Bible says that its easier for a rich man to fit thru the eye of a needle than into heaven. The eye of a needle’s got nothing on Music City. It’s more like a needle in the eye. But still they come and dream and pay some with the loneliness that any dream demands. Sometimes they even suffer. Sleep in a car for a few weeks, get a little hungry in their stomachs and eyes. Each trying to write something elusive and worthy of what they feel ghosting around in themselves. And some, reckoning that their own odds are no better than the lo...

Stealing Christmas This week near Bethlehem, Pa. in the middle of the night, a woman approached a Nativity scene outside a local church. Surveying the deserted street around her, she crept into the manger drawn to the porcelain statue of the Baby Jesus. She gently picked up the statue, cradling it. Then looking both ways, she slipped it beneath her coat and hurried away. The next night a nervous young man, who spent his entire life savings on a ring, fell to his knees in Times Square. He was about to ask the only girl he ever loved to save him from loneliness and marry him. As he stammered and reached for the ring it slipped from his hands, rolled away and disappeared into the black beneath a subway grate. The following morning a little girl in Mexico carefully wrote a Christmas letter to Santa Claus. The letter said that the girl's mother worked three jobs. That she was tired and sometimes late at night the girl could hear her crying. The letter asked, 'Please Santa ...

Love and Grief It took a few days…after…for the sky to return to blue. The subways and trading floors refilled with bodies and dreams all quietly trying to find some way to more. More wealth, more laughter. More time and life. And America, after taking a sucker punch for the ages, staggered to its feet. But death is not so easily boxed up and buried. Worry appeared where innocence and invulnerability had been. It mixed with rage and righteousness and hung in the air, just like the fog of invisible asbestos. My oldest friend John called me that morning from his Wall St. office. His voice shook with emotion as he watched the second plane explode any pretense of peace. Later, catching his reflection in a window he saw that his blue suit had become entirely white, his face chalky, covered with a mist of dry wall and asbestos. "I looked like my own ghost," he told me before he walked off the island and caught the last train home. Neither of us knew then that something s...

The Bridge There are profane places in Manhattan. Places where the human heart has beaten itself beyond recognition. There's an underground casino off Mott in Chinatown. The cops all know it's there. They’re paid to leave it alone. Common vice, like gambling, is hard to erase so instead it gets just gets pushed to the dark corners. It helps to know where trouble lives so you don’t have to go looking when it starts to spill out into the open. The guy that ran it kept a fish tank next to the blackjack table. Not exotic fish though. Somehow he got hold of some piranha. They were a special attraction to the Wall St guys that thought themselves big fish. The gamblers jonesing for any kind of new action used to bet on the fish, like dog fights. Gambling has always been a losers game. Places like that look to put the hook in you. Inevitably some hoper takes the big bet bait trying to beat back the odds and gets in deep. The kids college money or the mortgage gets sucked out of him...

A Small Jolt Some dried out drunks are like raisins. After enduring so much bitter they develop an unexpected sweetness. His features carried the accumulated weight of penance and its Siamese twin humility. The high life almost always demands the low.The blackout nights and broken promises, the lost friends and lies to others and himself had been cured from him. He wore rags, the remains of weather on his features and the unmistakable air of great suffering. He slept on park benches in the summer and apartment stairwells in the winter, paralyzed by the cruelest kind of unforgiveness. The kind you can never grant yourself. He adopted a small park in front of the local church, like he was sure God might stop someday on the way past and hear his confession. The local discount liquor store was on Damascus Street. And eventually, it took years of stumbling in the dark, this blind drunk was granted vision on that road. Years before he had been a captain on the Staten Island ferry...

Sawdust and Blood The first time was a man lying on 8th in front of the bus station. I was just a kid. A small clot of passersby, gawkers, stood silent sure that they should do something but uncertain what. An old woman blessed herself and whispered a prayer. Someone finally called EMS but life had already limped away by the time they arrived. The cops came with yellow tape. It’s meant to mark where life ends and death begins. But it had already trespassed into the eyes of living. The medical examiner came and made a few notes and the EMS lifted him into a bag. A cop began to argue over who was going to write it up. Another began to spread sawdust on the spot. Then straw. Sawdust soaks up blood. So does shoe leather and time. The straw is meant to cover it all. Eventually the wind takes hold and sweeps it away like there was never anything there like a heart that finally quit beating against worry or a dream that gave up it's ghost. I went by that spot a thousand times ...

I love long shots. I love broken down 47-1 thoroughbreds that you could time with a speed dial, penny stocks that might cure cancer and ancient off off off broadway actors that catch that one lightning in the bottle role they were born for. I love red faced fat guys struggling against the years of a sweet tooth at the back of the marathon pack and the limpers that continue into the dark long after the lights and finish line have returned to anonymous cracked pavement. There has never really been anything to love about smart money though. Nothing but the margin is ever risked. Those favorites have already won favor. They are the short odds and sure things. The safe play. Nothing miraculous there ever. But the long shots are the ones that should fail. The ones that carry some essential flaw at their core. They are the Army of Too. They’re the too slow, too short, the too foolish believers. They listen their whole lives to the critics, then let the catcalls find their way into back...

1968 Amputees say they still feel a missing leg. There's a phantom pain that remains long after what's taken is gone. It was long ago. But I still feel it. 1968 is the year part of me was taken. That year brought terrible collisions between old virtues and new verities. Truths taken of faith were tested and sometimes failed. Families were shaken to the bone by wars declared fought in jungles but also undeclared wars fought over kitchen tables. It was the year I discovered loss. The kind that climbs down and in and stays. And this year, 2024, has begun to feel like then. I recognize something in it. Something coming . 1968 began when a kid I knew was expelled from my Catholic grammar school for the grave sin of wearing Beatle boots. We both wore white shirts and clip on ties but the nuns explained he was a heretic. His hair was over his ears. And though we learned to read together, memorized the commandments and confessed our sins each Friday that year, they sa...