The Artful Trade

This week near Bethlehem, Pa. in the middle of the night, a woman approached a Nativity scene outside a local church. Surveying the deserted street around her, she crept into the manger drawn to the porcelain statue of the Baby Jesus. She gently picked up the statue,cradling it. Then looking both ways,she slipped it beneath her coat and hurried away. The next night a nervous young man, who spent his entire life savings on a ring, fell to his knees in Times Square. He was about to ask the only girl he ever loved to save from loneliness. To marry him. As he stammered and reached for the ring it slipped from his hands, rolled away and disappeared into the black beneath a subway grate. The following morning a little girl in Mexico carefully wrote a Christmas letter to Santa Claus. The letter said that the girl's mother worked three jobs. That she was tired and sometimes late at night the girl could hear her crying. The letter asked, 'Please Santa can you send something br...

The River There is a river that runs through this town. It is cold and dark and carries a current that is swift and silent and cannot be stopped. The current is hidden and courses through the river, whispering its icy demands. The river runs past the railway yards. It runs past factories and condominiums, past high rises and modest three room houses. It runs past the alleyways and the pews where prayers are said and faith is tested and sometimes broken. And it runs through the eyes of the people. There is a darkness in the river that swallows light and hope and spits out something pitiless. The dark and cold of it flows through the just and the unjust, the deserving and the undeserving, the contrite and the unforgiven alike. Sometimes late at night in the town there is a wail of a distant locomotive on its path away to places that are warm where the river cannot reach. Last week, an old woman, someone’s daughter or sister or mother, left a campfire where the poor stay near the tr...

The Welsh have a word. It has no simple English translation but roughly means a longing for a place or time to which you cannot return. A yearning for that which no longer exists or, perhaps, never really was. Hiraeth the grief for lost and unreachable places. For home. Home is the first thing you know. It crawls into you young and then slowly begins to dissolve. It dissolves into far off cities and ambition. It boils away under a flame of desire and confidence that the future will be sweeter than the past. Until one day you find yourself surrounded by strangers and compromise, and home, is suddenly unreachable. What is left is only the smoke from a fire that once warmed you. As inescapable and as it is unreachable. . Before long you carry an old photo in your wallet, a relic of who you used to be. A passport for a country that no longer exists. You stare at it like a map that will someday offer a way back from all you have given away. And all that Time has taken. The first t...

They tore down an old heartache on Cahal Avenue this morning. The bulldozer worked carefully, gently toppling the deserted two story brick building. But heartache, especially old heartache, is nearly impossible to demolish. Its rubble becomes dust and the dust gets up into the wind and whatever is left is hauled away and buried in memory. The building had been empty since 2007 when a fourteen year old boy wanted cigarettes he could not afford. He wanted to be older and tugging on a Camel, he thought, could make him feel like a man. Like most young boys, there was a lot he did not have. He didn't have a lick of sense or any idea how quickly life can change. He had no understanding of how fragile a future is or how unforgiving the world can be. And he had no care for life, an old woman's or even, as it turns out, his own. Still there were other things he had. Things most boys carry. He had a first job waiting on him, a first kiss too, and that first kind of youthful hope...

Playing Dead I knew an old man once. His wife had died suddenly leaving him with only time and memory to accompany him. On advice from a friend he got a shelter dog someone had pushed out of a car when it was too old to keep. The old man, injured by love and loss, had grown bitter. He tried to teach the old dog new tricks. He tried endlessly to teach it to play dead. When the dog refused, he would kick it. The dog forgave the old man, who it turned out, was really just teaching himself to play dead. And in time it was the dog that taught the man what every thrown away shelter dog knows. How to forgive. And how to live again.

The tracks near the apartment building had been quiet for years. The shoe factory in that part of Warsaw had closed as the Depression spread, and nothing took its place so the railroad had suspended its freight runs. That day the gypsy had finished his violin lesson with the boy. It had been three years and he had taught him all he knew and had given him all he was. He had shown Dabo how to feel the sound in everything around him, how to sand away the silence and begin to speak for it. He taught him to be truthful and unafraid of being hurt by what he felt in the truth. “You must reach into the worry and past the fear in your heart. Memorize it, then banish it forever. How will you ever be able to speak for others if you have not felt the wound yourself?” That day in early autumn the old man closed his eyes and listened to the boy play. “Put that down for now. Come and sit with me.” The boy stood still then stepped closer and sat beside his teacher. "You have learn...

Sara worked at the resort hotel as a chambermaid, making beds and smoothing sheets for the city people. She had left her home in Maine dreaming of a warmer kind of life but only managed a few hundred miles and that was not enough to outdistance the cold. She was born with a wine red birthmark in the shape of a heart that covered one side of her face. Her daddy always told her, “Some people hide their hearts. Some people wear ‘em on their sleeve. Yours will always be on your face.” But whenever she looked at herself in a mirror, all she saw was a stain. And all she dreamed of, when she allowed herself to dream, was something strong enough, perhaps love, to clean it all away. But love she knew didn’t exist for a girl like her. A big girl. A hard worker. A bedsheet girl, with the stain of a heart on her face. The kind of girl no one could see and if they somehow did could not remember. No, that was for the others that men looked at and dreamed of. Girls with soft hands and fair ...

The church was built by the Amish just after the Great War. They wanted refuge from progress and the contagion brought home by the returning soldiers. Progress and the virus both spread through the countryside that year and the Amish thought both a kind of sickness. But later in the 20s they abandoned Everton when the first railroad began to bring city people looking for cool in the summer and the mountain air in the fall. So the church changed hands again and again over the years. First Episcopalians, then Latter Day Saints and finally Catholic. The townspeople thought God didn’t much care. The gospel’s the same no matter who’s preaching it and sinners all kneel the same anyway. The church had a bell with a rope. For years the clergyman would ring once at noon, twice at dusk and three times at midnight to end one day and begin another. The priest in 1946 was an old man. He was pious and tender but drank too much. When he said mass each dawn his hands trembled until he drank...

That night, their first married, the boy held his wife’s hand. “I know it’s not what we hoped but it’ll be all right.” She began to weep and gripping his hand, stepped closer and whispered, “Good night husband." He leaned toward her, then took her in his arms and the distance between them disappeared. She kissed him the way a woman sometimes does, not with her lips or her arms but with something greater than herself, like something deep in her was trying to force its way to the surface for just a moment. The boy felt something in him warm and he remembered the cold of the field in France and heard himself praying once again for her and for time. He felt himself grow stronger and surer the way a man does when, in spite of all his failings and mistakes, a woman still somehow believes in him. And so somehow he comes to believe in himself. He stepped back. “It’ll be all right," he said again and she nodded. She started up the stairs and turned again to look at him and s...

The Suddenness of Burt The first time I heard Burt Bacharach I was a kid at a party slow dancing with a girl that years later I came to love. Karen Carpenter’s voice singing Close To You. But it was the sound under the words I felt whispering to me. Telling me something had suddenly changed. Something I had never felt before. Something entirely new that I had never heard before. It was a different kind of song, like it was written with different kind of notes. A new kind of math. The same old 88 keys but, like bricks, erected in an entirely new way. The first skyscraper in a land of Levitt houses. A cathedral rising from the bones of a one room pine pew church. They played the record over and over that night. And I listened to the voice under the voice telling me a secret about love. About what it could and couldn't do. About what I could and couldn’t expect. I felt changed. Suddenly. We are taught that history is gradual. A slow roll of events circling inevitably towar...

Mercy 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 autobody place down on Harding." 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 himself had moved lower the way it sometimes does in a man. But Katie Dowling could see there was something else. Something damaged about him, 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. A dented up in...

It was slow at first. Small towns can carry suspicion and the pastry that peered out of those first floor windows seemed foreign and so in question. But that first year Jack Whitaker’s wife had planned a wedding reception at their house on Elm. Their only son, just 18, was marrying a girl from the next town over. The girl’s mother asked Ms. Whitaker to make the cake. Ms. Whitaker loved her only son and she wanted it to be special so she asked around town and collected recipes and studied them until she settled on one. She gathered the ingredients and two days before the wedding began her labor of love. She measured carefully, greased the pans and stirred the batter as the recipe demanded. When she put the cake in the oven the day before the wedding she was sure it would be the best thing she had ever made. It had to be perfect. Her mother had told her a wedding cake is a sign …a sign of how sweet a marriage would be. And Ms. Whitaker, a sentimental woman, believed it beca...

The Great Replacement The baker, an old Italian man, whispered “I’m sorry.” He had spent his life trying to bring something sweet to the life around him. But that morning all he could taste was the bitter in the words he knew would bring only heartache. When Giuseppe, his apprentice, arrived at dawn he decided it was best to be quick. But as he spoke he felt something in himself sour. “My daughter…she is marrying. Her husband will need work. I cannot keep you both.” “You are replacing me?” Giuseppe asked. The old man watched his young friend tremble with distress, then nodded. He touched Giuseppe’s shoulder but his hand felt heavy and cold. He caught sight of himself in some glass, at the crumble of his own expression, at the disappointment in himself, that he could do such a thing. But what choice did he have? This Depression made even good men cruel. As he stepped away Giuseppe told himself that great things often have bad beginnings. But all he could feel was loss filling...