The Artful Trade

Many years ago, traveling alone through the west of Ireland, I found myself in a small village called Dungloe. It was Sunday. Though most of the town was closed, everyone I saw was headed to the local community hall. As it turned out, that day was the finals of the Claddagh dancing competition for the girls of Dungloe. In Ireland most girls learn to step dance from the time they can walk. This contest, held once a year for 13-year-olds, is more than just a dance competition. It is a kind of rite of passage, the first tentative steps toward womanhood and all it carries. I had a couple hours before the bus to Dublin, so I followed the crowd to the hall, then up two long stairways to the second floor. The town crowded around a dance floor watching each girl in Gaelic costume carefully tap out the ancient morse code of Ireland. For about an hour I watched the frenetic precision of the dancers. As I started down, I saw a young girl, dressed to dance, on the first landing, clutching the...

The Nearness I grew up just the other side of the tracks, by the railroad, near but always outside the good part of Brooklyn. In those days, my mother would read and reread the travel section in the Sunday paper. About places that were warmer and sweeter. Places promising each week that they were near, or at least within reach. But seeing just how far away those places really were, she would put the paper out with the garbage. As useless as old chicken bones. My father spent his days trying to get near the things he wanted for his family. A better job, enough of the never-enough kind of money, a house big enough to hold his dreams for himself, his wife and young son. Things that were somehow always just beyond his reach. On Mondays when he took out the trash, he would see my mother’s thrown-away hopes for some kind of better Elsewhere. So he would walk the few blocks to the local produce and buy her some day-old roses from the remainder bin. The kind that smell sweet for only a ...

When I lived up in East Nashville 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 all trying to get someplace else. I 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. I was the kind of guy that did my 8 and 40 and 365, then came home and tried to find some relief in the overtime between shifts. Then each dawn I would climb into my rusty truck and go out trying to repair whatever got torn down in the darkness. That year I met this girl, a kind of stray, and eventually she moved in. I guess I was trying to save her or maybe just myself. I asked her a couple times to marry me. But she always said she needed more time, which is Woman for No. But I didn’t speak Woman, so I never really understood. I guess I thought ...

Blindspot There are two kinds of blindness. The first kind is full of darkness and the things you didn’t see coming. The hurtling cab as you step off the curb, the sudden unexpected pink slip, the wife’s suitcase finally packed and waiting in the front hall. The second is a blinding light. It carries only those things you cannot unsee. The losses that arrive in small black hours. The incandescent regret burned into the dark of your memory. The mistakes you can’t see past. And vision, if it ever comes, is not cheap. You must pay. And sometimes it takes a kind of blindness to finally see. Years ago I lived near a home for the blind in New York City. It was a non-descript building, so plain it was nearly invisible. It had a huge all-seeing eye on a sign and beneath it the words “We Seek Vision.” Some graffiti guy spray painted the eye black that summer. I was living in a rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East side off Delancey. There was an old man who lived next door. ...

Chapter 21 Albuquerque The ships kept coming that September, slipping each night into New York harbor after the 13-day return across the North Atlantic. The world had once again been saved from itself, but war, as its always does, took its price in blood. There was a weariness to the soldiers on the decks but an expectation too. The men who had left as boys stood looking at the lights, trying to remember what home and love felt like, telling themselves that the war was behind them now. But some part in each remained unconvinced, like the past had crossed ahead of them and waited now in the eyes of everyone they ever knew. “Look at that,” a GI from Albuquerque said. “Never seen something piled so high,them buildings.” He tugged at an empty sleeve with his good hand. “Where I’m from things is spread out, farms and fences, not all scraped together like this here.” “Yeah big cities. They sure can pile it up,” another said. “Hey Pasqual you said you’s from here right?...

Inseparable willmaguiretn@mail.com When I was seventeen and living on my own, certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home. My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead.It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living. The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door. The only thing past there was the interstate, the county line and the cemetery. That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter. I was poor and dumb and usually hungry and broke so I was always looking for another job. Passing through one day, I saw a Help Wanted sign and answered it. They hired me on the spot. The people there were so old I thought they were another species. Kind of human, but not like me. They weren't racing through the day...