The Artful Trade

Amputees often feel a pain from a part that has been taken. It’s called phantom pain. An arm or leg is gone, but the pain in it somehow remains in the absence. A marker of something essential now and forever missing. The body remembers being whole. And pain…that ghostly phantom pain, is the only way it has remind us of all we once were. 1968 is that year for me. The year something essential was taken. That was long ago. But I still feel it. That year in America brought terrible collisions between old virtues and new verities. Truths taken on faith were tested and sometimes failed. Families were shaken to the bone by wars declared and fought in jungles but also those undeclared fought over kitchen tables. It was the year I discovered loss. Not the temporary disappointments or wounds of childhood. The other kind. The kind that climbs down and in. The kind that changes you. It whispers who you were is no more. This year, 2026, has begun to feel like then. I recognize something in i...

That day, like every other, brokers poured snake oil into telephones, and traders howled orders. Money, as it always does, chased more. In the office towers, ticker tape raced. But down below in Manhattan’s side streets, dimes limped after dollars on betting slips. The numbers racket. Any working stiff understands that a dime’s worth of maybe could buy a dollar’s worth of almost. Almost enough when the month's end shows up with its hand out. Eight million souls each day tried to find the right combination to transform themselves. Tried to conjure up some mathematical formula for rest or the square root of happiness. Some equation that would, for a moment stop the world from reaching into your wallet. And all that transformation required was a few numbers on a paper slip. The slips were collected at newsstands and street carts, in barrooms and police holding cells. They gathered in alleys behind sweatshops and cathouses . . . anywhere where worry grows. The slips were...

Monarchs “There are no straight lines in Nature,” Vane told me. “And all living things are trying to get somewhere else.” I was proofing an article on migration patterns for the scientific journal. Dr. Elias Vane, was a leading entomologist. A bug guy and one of the world’s foremost experts on migration. “Think whales routes and cattle drives.” “Old couples go to Florida each winter,” I said. “Exactly,” he said. “You see, we all have migration patterns. Repetition so deeply ingrained that all living things carry, but remain hidden even from themselves. Most of these paths can be understood by simple observation,” he said. “But sometimes even science cannot fathom what secret routes are in play. What ancient hungers and worries…what desires and fears…drive living creatures.” “For example?” I asked. “Take the monarch butterfly,” he murmured in measured tones. “Every year by the millions, monarchs try to escape the cold. They make an annual flight from central Canada to M...

The platform was empty except a beggar wearing a dead man’s suit. Under his tattooed arm he carried a violin case. All around him were people desperately trying to get where they were sure they needed to be. Each with a timetable, a schedule, and a train number. The city has always been a numbers game. Lives there are measured by salaries and bonuses. People gauge themselves by age and weight, by their credit scores and debts, by dress sizes or the number of shots needed to go home alone again on a Friday night. Failure is measured by the number of unpaid bills stacked up beside a bed. But success is measured in square feet. Dreams, like apartments, are studio-sized small or circus-tent big. They are a pair of shoes that no longer fit or your daddy’s wingtips, too big to wear. For Dabo, the payout was fifty to one. But he had beaten the numbers game even before his feet touched the city’s soil. There were 6 million dead and only a handful of survivors. It was this terrible ide...

I was not much older than a boy. A runaway living in a third floor walkup in Hell’s Kitchen. Looking for whatever work I could find to pay the rent and keep my belly still. Morris was a last call shape up worker. Unreliable because of the three day drunks he sometimes went on after his son died and his wife left. But the city took him on in a pinch and then he convinced them it was a two man job. So they let him hire me, just a kid, on the cheap. Off the books. But the project manager made it clear. I was supposed to make him show up on time. The runaway babysitting the soul scarred drunk. Both of us trying to rewire those townhouses and ourselves before we were burned to the ground by the slow fire of a faulty connection or memory. Both of us trying to earn back the light we each had lost. “It’s all wired up wrong.” he said again and again. “All of it.” We spent that summer changing out substandard wires some low life contractor had used to wire up a line of refurbed shells i...

Confetti There is an ancient Irish legend I heard as a boy. The story goes that God created mankind and angels. Men wandered the earth and angels the heavens. Both man and angel were alone. Seeing this God broke man’s heart in two and gave half to woman. He cut the human heart in two so that together they might solve their loneliness. But he left the angels hearts intact…unbroken. Only a broken heart can ever hope to become full. So these creatures remained, small and empty, locked up in the eternity of themselves. They knew nothing of what it is to flee into someone else eyes or offer shelter in your own. To become larger than your own want. Most quietly endured that existence.But there was one kind that watched humanity from afar, then drawn to it came to dwell among the living. This kind of angel fell in love with humanity. But there was, as always, a price. Beneath the human beauty,intoxicating and irresistible,was the acid of living. Its irrevocable flaws. Its sorrow, its inh...

Hard But Sweet “Its too hard,” the small boy said to his grandmother. “I know,” she answered. “But once you get past the hard, it’s sweet. Go on now. Try.” The boy bit into the apple again and again until he reached the sweet center of it. The old woman lived in a three room walkup off 10th Avenue. Her daughter had fallen in love with a sailor on one of the merchant marine freighters that came through the west side. The daughter was just 17 and at 17, she confused lonely with love.The sailor was the kind of man that looks for a door to get out in every room he ever walked in. He was in another port looking for another little bit of lonely by the time she felt the first kick. The lonely in the girl masqueraded as love thenA changed into worry when her letters were all returned. Her mother held her hand and told her, “Young is mostly dumb. No crime in that. There’s no help for it except living a little bit of wrong into you, so’s you know dumb next time.” The girl cried each nigh...

Saving Christmas There was a panhandler that for years stood at the center of Times Square. One of the forgotten souls, a little off and dressed in rags, he had the air of someone that had found their purpose. Each day deep into the night he chanted his creed to the crowd passing by, ignoring him. “Living is hard,” he cried out. “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. Beauty had begun to seem beyond my reach. 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. It was the first fall of the year. With snow and love the first fall is always the purest. The heart of the city is never ready for the cold. City people bury themselves in apartments, turns the locks and pray for spring. And for a time the ceaselessness of the ...

Red Light Town I lived for a short time in florida. A tiny town with just one traffic light. At one end of the town was a tool and dye where just about everybody worked. At the other other end was a church and behind it a yard with gravestones, all the names worn away by weather. In that part of the country there are wide swaths of unincorporated land and in the summer the thunderheads roll in off the ocean. Often a lightning strike hits some brush and starts a fire that burns hard and wild for a time, until it burns itself out. You can see them from the turnpike at night. Wild fires blazing away nearly out of sight until there's nothing left to burn. The tool and dye started losing business then laid off the people in waves. The graveyard shifts got smaller and the graveyard bigger. And that street ran just one way, from the plant to the churchyard. I knew a young couple there. He made their living with that tool and die kind of life. When they finally shut it down and chaine...

The Light of the World “The operation saved your sight,” the doctor explained. “Without it you would be blind.” He paused, looked away, then added, “It’s not all good news, I’m afraid. Without what we removed… that diseased filter… seeing will eventually become painful. Even unbearable. It will take years but eventually it will feel like burning. But at least you’ll see.” He paused.“You may even be able to see… more.” Worried, I asked, “More? What do you mean?” The doctor touched me on the shoulder. “Most of us see the world through a lens darkly. It protects us. We never see the world as it really is. Yours was damaged. It’s very rare but it happens. You know Joyce, the Irish writer? He’s the most famous example in the medical texts. Joyce had fourteen surgeries before they finally understood the trouble. Near the end he said that simply opening his eyes each morning was like filling them with acid. He suffered a great deal.” The doctor hesitated. “He called it a light all ar...