The Artful Trade

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