The Artful Trade

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.