The Artful Trade

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Higher Power

Higher Power Years ago, as a much younger man, I worked for a short time on a fishing boat off the Cape. The job was mainly hauling nets and pouring the catch into holds and cleaning the decks. But this was near the whale routes, so every once in a while, when the sea was quiet, I could feel something great and close — but always hidden beneath the surface. The waves would shudder slightly, and though I could never see it clearly, there was the feeling of a presence larger and closer than it should be. Powerful but hidden. Terrible and beautiful at once. Sometimes if I looked at just the right moment I could see its shadow. And every once in a great while the shadow would come crashing through the surface — visible for just an instant before being pulled back below. When I was growing up, my folks had a house near the transformer that was the main electrical line into town. It was a large steel tower draped with thick cables. Most of the time it was silent, just a presence. But...

Chain Lightning

Chain Lightning The old man, like every old man, carried a drought in his eyes. He had lived long enough to know that sometimes the rain just quits. And he knew doubt grows and fears get loose at 3 a.m. He came to expect the ache in his back and trust in his sweat to be a different kind of rain. Like there was a storm in him. A kind of dry lightning. He had seen droughts before. But this year seemed different. The ground was harder. So was living. His wife, so sick, smiled once like she was remembering him on one knee, promising to give her everything he would ever have. But here he was, doubling up, both knees now, begging God for Time. And though God listens, Time never will. After she was gone, the drought felt like it would finally dry up the last drop of his dreams. The corn went dry, then so did hope. It cracked down the middle. Like it was all stalk. But after every dawn-to-dark day, he would clear away his one dish and step out the front door. He’d walk into the rows un...

Letter From Tucson

She ended up in Tucson, married to a kind man with sad eyes who ran a spare parts yard. They had three children, and she grew old with him. She wrote me once, many years later, to explain how it had all worked out for her—how she had slowly become happy, or at least as close to it as an orphan's soul allows. She wrote that she thought I saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket. The truth is,she saved me. But redemption is never a one-time thing. It demands a kind of repetition—like a prayer. And a soul must be washed free of the dust of living again and again. So we work the dirt of dreams into our hands and pray that something beneath the struggle—something true in it—will find its way down into us. Through our scars. She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window, and a young man filled with stains and the murmur in his heart. She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of...

Where The High Cotton Grows

I had a friend in my New York days, a street guy. He made his living recognizing innocence and harvesting it, which in most big cities is a cottage industry. Like all street guys he was hard and sharp. Always working the angles. But he had a terrible weakness. He was a real sucker for women. Divorced four times but always sure the next romance was going to be the real thing. That authentic 'take it to your grave' love. And so he was dragged over the coals regularly. The king of broken hearts. Whenever I was out with him we would end up half in the bag in some dingy closing time Brooklyn saloon. Those shot and beer joints made for Lonesome. You practically needed a lonely union card to get in past midnight. He was a bad drunk. So after another week of taking it in the teeth, like every bad drunk that has ever lived, he wanted to swing away at the world. He thought he could beat the unfairness out of it. Inevitably he'd end up in some after hours alley with some other ...

A Thin Place

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 ...

River Girls

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

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...

A Dirty Miracle

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...

Dabo

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

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

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

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

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...