The Artful Trade

Before Dabo ever touched a violin he heard music. He heard it in the sound of his father’s shoes scraping against the apartment stairs coming home each night. He heard it in his mother’s worried eyes when she was sure his midwinter wheeze was pneumonia and in the click of the radiator when the salvation of warmth finally forced its way up the pipes. At his window in the early morning he heard it in the echo of horse hooves and the clink of milkmen’s glass bottles as they rocked over the cobblestones of Jewish Warsaw. All of it sang to Michelska Gabriel Dabowsky before he ever played a note. A phantom sound that played in the back of him. But it waited far beneath his ears rising only in his dreams before receding with each day. It was always some whisper of a melody, sad but sweet too. And timid, as though it knew it could exist only in the shadows. The first time Dabo heard a bow on a string he felt a larger part of himself, an unheard part, suddenly speaking. When he was 16...

True Love and Monsters explains the physics of love...about that first flight,about its gravity—how it lifts us when we're young and grounds as we age. It follows a runaway teen who learns to fly on blacktop courts and whisper salvation through summer screens, only to discover that some hearts can’t be saved, and that love, over time, doesn’t get lighter—it gets truer, and heavier. It explores how hope changes, how heartbreak transforms, and how the monsters we fear most eventually show up wearing our own faces. It asks what it means to fly, to love deeply when the fall, the cost is all but guaranteed. And why we keep doing it anyway. - - - The Year I Learned to Fly When you’re 17 all love is still true. There are no false notes in you yet. No irretrievable mistakes, no years long dead ends or unforgiven sins to carry. Hope is still like wet concrete that has not yet started to harden into rationale and excuse. Faith, in yourself and what you feel, though hidden, is s...

Lucky Dog The church sign read, “Trouble is just a rest stop on the way to Good.” The paint had cracked and faded and one of the Os had begun to disappear, which made the sign seem even more like a prayer. That road had been trouble since the county had surveyed the bypass then paved it. The town folk avoided it after it took four teenagers that first year on a blind curve. The church people were certain though it meant their souls had found their way to Good or to God. Depending on their faith or their spelling. That night the rain was hard and a flatbed slowed then stopped on the curve. The door opened and a man pushed a dog out onto the shoulder. He didn’t say that he was tired of cleaning up after one more puppy or that dog food cost too damn much. Instead he whispered to himself that terrible is a rest stop on the way to good, like the sign said. Then the man slammed the door, the engine muttered and the tail lights, just like the man’s conscience, slipped away into darknes...

Light and the City The beggar was unshaven and even at 100 degrees wore an overcoat. But the old man, always gauging hidden worth, felt something else. Something rare, something valuable. Dabo stood silent, eyes down, humbled and uncertain. Three months on the street had hardened his features but softened his eyes. Forfet felt something else in him. His business was listening to lies. “She don’t need this ring,” or “He’s finally got a job if we can just make it to the end of the month,” or “Just take it, I never loved her anyway.” His currency was the lies that people tell themselves just to get through one more week or month or year. And so he could not help but feel the truth whenever it stumbled into his shop. Some things, he knew, can’t help but tell the truth. Small children, old dogs and drunks. Truth, he knew, has a tone, undeniable as a church bell. And now looking at this beggar before him, Forfet could feel that low tolling resonance, incapable of misrepresenting...

When A Songwriter Dies They come in uhauls dragging their hopes and heartaches. They come on Greyhounds with a bus ticket and a beat up guitar and the address of a friend that has a couch. They come with the certainty of sinners at salvation's gate. Sure that the right musical confession sung with just the right amount of hope and regret will swing the doors open. So they squeeze their talent until the last drop finds its way into their choruses. The Bible says that its easier for a rich man to fit thru the eye of a needle than into heaven. The eye of a needle’s got nothing on Music City. It’s more like a needle in the eye. But still they come and dream and pay some with the loneliness that any dream demands. Sometimes they even suffer. Sleep in a car for a few weeks, get a little hungry in their stomachs and eyes. Each trying to write something elusive and worthy of what they feel ghosting around in themselves. And some, reckoning that their own odds are no better than the lo...