The Artful Trade

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...