The Artful Trade

Dyslexic W. Maguire copyright@2018 In Bethlehem.... Pennsylvania... a woman crept up to a Nativity scene in the middle of the night and approached the statue of the baby Jesus.  Then she stole it. And a nervous young man, who spent his entire savings on a ring fell to his knees in Times Sq., about to ask a girl to end his loneliness. The ring slipped from his hands, rolled away and disappeared down a subway grate. At the same time a little girl in Mexico attached a letter to Santa to a balloon. The only way she could think of sending her silent prayer to the North Pole. The ring was recovered. She said yes.  And so the young man was saved from his loneliness.  The balloon never made it to the North Pole. But it was found by a widowed rancher in Arizona. He saw the letter and decided to answer that little girl's prayer. Jesus and the woman that needed saving so badly that she tried to steal it, are still missing.  Both will be recovered though. 

Faithful Will Maguire copyright@2018 I was in Walmart today to return a small space heater I bought. Turns out I must be more cold hearted than I knew...need a bigger heater.   In front of me is a girl, maybe 21, army coat...gloves with holes. She's paying an installment on a layaway for some Xmas presents for her little girl. Counting dollar bills and change. The manager quietly tells her that someone came in earlier...asked to pay off all the pending December layaways for kids presents. He said this man had paid off her entire debt...and that she owed nothing. She starts crying of course, which was sweet. Very sweet...relief mixed with surprise and gratitude. The manager pulls out his phone and takes a pic because real selfless generousity is like Sasquatch. He needed proof I suppose. Some people in line behind me heard and asked if all Christmas layaways were cleared or just hers. He said all...they started crying too. I'm watching all this..and started hu

Veterans Day Dear Dad, You lied about your age.. you were just 16...so you could enlist. You were shot in head and left for dead alone in a ditch in a winters woods of France. You prayed to the Blessed Mother for one year with that girl in NY. And somehow you survived and came home. Her family said stay away.. hes a crazy Irish man who was shot in the head. But she decided to listen to her heart instead of them. I'm pretty glad about that...otherwise I'd be some old whisper in the wind instead of the word chaser and bellower I've become. You were married for 66 years and would have been for another 66 if flesh was as strong as feeling. Anyway...proud to be your son. Hope your dna wins out over my hubris...i can feel it sometimes swirling way down deep in me. Your grateful son

A Hard Dog When I lived up in East Nash there was a pack of abandoned dogs that ran that part of town each night. My street dead ended against the highway and they would gather together and listen to the sound of tires on the asphalt and AM radios all trying to get someplace else. The guy that lived next door worked as a lineman for the electric company upgrading wires and boxes and repairing down cable when the wind blew hard. That spring the wind kept pulling it all down. He was the kind of guy that did his 8 and 40 and 365 then came home and tried to find some happiness and love in the overtime between shifts.  Then each dawn he would climb into his rusty truck and go out trying to repair whatever got torn down in the darkness.  That year he had met this girl, a kind of stray, and she eventually moved in.  I guess he was trying to save her or maybe just himself or both. He asked her a couple times to marry him. But she always said she needed more time…wh

Saving Christmas Will Maguire copyright@2018 When I lived in NYC in my early 20s there was a panhandler that stood in Times Square next to the Doomsday Preachers. But he didn’t holler “Jesus is coming, the End is near!”  Instead all day long he would chant the same two lines - “Living is hard. Living is beautiful - The hard is trying to make you beautiful." By the time I was 23 I had already lived a good bit of hard into me, the kind that makes you turn over at night because you‘ve become afraid of your dreams. I would try each night to sleep but after a few hours would go out and walk the city streets, just hoping to exhaust myself. That year, in mid-December, a blizzard blew in - 5 degrees, a foot of snow on the ground. I didn’t care. My dreams were far colder so I bundled up and started down Third Avenue, alone once more in a storm on the deserted streets. It was the first fall that year. With snow and love the first fall is always the hardest. The heart of the

Someday I’ll Learn to Fly  Will Maguire   copyright@2018 Once there was a jungle and in the jungle was a river. And the river was full of mud. There each day a herd of rhinoceros swam. Among them was a very young rhino and like all rhinos he played in the mud and ran with the herd.  But at night when the jungle was quiet, flying high above the river, he could see birds.  One day he asked his mother  ‘Mama…will I ever fly?’ She shook her head “No son. The birds have the air and we have the mud.” “No rhino will ever fly.”  And the young rhino was sad. That night he awoke to the sound of a great wind and a light like a star in the sky. And high above the jungle, flying like a bird, he saw a very old rhino.  The next day he told his father  “Last night I saw an old rhino fly away.” “It was just a dream son. No rhino will ever fly.” his father said.  "Be grateful for the mud.” The young rhino looked at the river then