The Artful Trade

Hard But Sweet “Its too hard,” the small boy said to his grandmother. “I know,” she answered. “But once you get past the hard, it’s sweet. Go on now. Try.” The boy bit into the apple again and again until he reached the sweet center of it. The old woman lived in a three room walkup off 10th Avenue. Her daughter had fallen in love with a sailor on one of the merchant marine freighters that came through the west side. The daughter was just 17 and at 17, she confused lonely with love.The sailor was the kind of man that looks for a door to get out in every room he ever walked in. He was in another port looking for another little bit of lonely by the time she felt the first kick. The lonely in the girl masqueraded as love thenA changed into worry when her letters were all returned. Her mother held her hand and told her, “Young is mostly dumb. No crime in that. There’s no help for it except living a little bit of wrong into you, so’s you know dumb next time.” The girl cried each nigh...

Saving Christmas There was a panhandler that for years stood at the center of Times Square. One of the forgotten souls, a little off and dressed in rags, he had the air of someone that had found their purpose. Each day deep into the night he chanted his creed to the crowd passing by, ignoring him. “Living is hard,” he cried out. “Living is beautiful… The hard is trying to make you beautiful." By the time I was 23 I had already lived a good bit of hard into me. Beauty had begun to seem beyond my reach. I would try each night to sleep but after a few hours would go out and walk the city streets, just hoping to exhaust myself. That year, in mid-December, a blizzard blew in, 5 degrees, a foot of snow on the ground. It was the first fall of the year. With snow and love the first fall is always the purest. The heart of the city is never ready for the cold. City people bury themselves in apartments, turns the locks and pray for spring. And for a time the ceaselessness of the ...

Red Light Town I lived for a short time in florida. A tiny town with just one traffic light. At one end of the town was a tool and dye where just about everybody worked. At the other other end was a church and behind it a yard with gravestones, all the names worn away by weather. In that part of the country there are wide swaths of unincorporated land and in the summer the thunderheads roll in off the ocean. Often a lightning strike hits some brush and starts a fire that burns hard and wild for a time, until it burns itself out. You can see them from the turnpike at night. Wild fires blazing away nearly out of sight until there's nothing left to burn. The tool and dye started losing business then laid off the people in waves. The graveyard shifts got smaller and the graveyard bigger. And that street ran just one way, from the plant to the churchyard. I knew a young couple there. He made their living with that tool and die kind of life. When they finally shut it down and chaine...

The Light of the World “The operation saved your sight,” the doctor explained. “Without it you would be blind.” He paused, looked away, then added, “It’s not all good news, I’m afraid. Without what we removed… that diseased filter… seeing will eventually become painful. Even unbearable. It will take years but eventually it will feel like burning. But at least you’ll see.” He paused.“You may even be able to see… more.” Worried, I asked, “More? What do you mean?” The doctor touched me on the shoulder. “Most of us see the world through a lens darkly. It protects us. We never see the world as it really is. Yours was damaged. It’s very rare but it happens. You know Joyce, the Irish writer? He’s the most famous example in the medical texts. Joyce had fourteen surgeries before they finally understood the trouble. Near the end he said that simply opening his eyes each morning was like filling them with acid. He suffered a great deal.” The doctor hesitated. “He called it a light all ar...

Higher Power Years ago, as a much younger man, I worked for a short time on a fishing boat off the Cape. The job was mainly hauling nets and pouring the catch into holds and cleaning the decks. But this was near the whale routes, so every once in a while, when the sea was quiet, I could feel something great and close — but always hidden beneath the surface. The waves would shudder slightly, and though I could never see it clearly, there was the feeling of a presence larger and closer than it should be. Powerful but hidden. Terrible and beautiful at once. Sometimes if I looked at just the right moment I could see its shadow. And every once in a great while the shadow would come crashing through the surface — visible for just an instant before being pulled back below. When I was growing up, my folks had a house near the transformer that was the main electrical line into town. It was a large steel tower draped with thick cables. Most of the time it was silent, just a presence. But...

Chain Lightning The old man, like every old man, carried a drought in his eyes. He had lived long enough to know that sometimes the rain just quits. And he knew doubt grows and fears get loose at 3 a.m. He came to expect the ache in his back and trust in his sweat to be a different kind of rain. Like there was a storm in him. A kind of dry lightning. He had seen droughts before. But this year seemed different. The ground was harder. So was living. His wife, so sick, smiled once like she was remembering him on one knee, promising to give her everything he would ever have. But here he was, doubling up, both knees now, begging God for Time. And though God listens, Time never will. After she was gone, the drought felt like it would finally dry up the last drop of his dreams. The corn went dry, then so did hope. It cracked down the middle. Like it was all stalk. But after every dawn-to-dark day, he would clear away his one dish and step out the front door. He’d walk into the rows un...

She ended up in Tucson, married to a kind man with sad eyes who ran a spare parts yard. They had three children, and she grew old with him. She wrote me once, many years later, to explain how it had all worked out for her—how she had slowly become happy, or at least as close to it as an orphan's soul allows. She wrote that she thought I saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket. The truth is,she saved me. But redemption is never a one-time thing. It demands a kind of repetition—like a prayer. And a soul must be washed free of the dust of living again and again. So we work the dirt of dreams into our hands and pray that something beneath the struggle—something true in it—will find its way down into us. Through our scars. She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window, and a young man filled with stains and the murmur in his heart. She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of...

I had a friend in my New York days, a street guy. He made his living recognizing innocence and harvesting it, which in most big cities is a cottage industry. Like all street guys he was hard and sharp. Always working the angles. But he had a terrible weakness. He was a real sucker for women. Divorced four times but always sure the next romance was going to be the real thing. That authentic 'take it to your grave' love. And so he was dragged over the coals regularly. The king of broken hearts. Whenever I was out with him we would end up half in the bag in some dingy closing time Brooklyn saloon. Those shot and beer joints made for Lonesome. You practically needed a lonely union card to get in past midnight. He was a bad drunk. So after another week of taking it in the teeth, like every bad drunk that has ever lived, he wanted to swing away at the world. He thought he could beat the unfairness out of it. Inevitably he'd end up in some after hours alley with some other ...

This is a story of broken bodies and imperfect love, of ancient music and unexpected courage, and of the rare, fleeting moment.. a thin place, when a veil lifts and we glimpse something holy rising from the cracks. A Thin Place In Ireland, you might hear them quietly mentioned after Mass or whispered in a pub, like a secret almost too fragile to say out loud. The Irish call them 'thin places.' Those moments where the ordinary and the sacred seem to collide. They are the cracks between world that surrounds us and something just beyond our reach…a momentary fracture in the everyday that allows something holy to spill thru. Years ago, traveling alone through the west of Ireland, I stumbled upon such a place. I was in the small Irish village of Dungloe. It was Sunday morning and I was waiting for a bus to Dublin. Mass had just let out and as the pews emptied I noticed everyone headed for the local town hall. As it turned out that day was the finals for the step dancing ...

He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up. He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs. There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants, which means they answer phones, smile till their jaws hurt and grind their teeth at night with worry that they don't belong, and never will, on this side of the river. Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. The girls tell themselves a man’s lingering presence means 'I need you' or 'only you can save me.' It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife.Or I’m tired of the harangue of living. It means I’m tired of the way...

The Work of the Living 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 auto body place, down Valdosta." 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 him had moved lower the way it sometimes does in a man. But Katie Dowling could see there was something else. Something damaged, 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. That dente...

That last night before she left I went home and stripped. And I scrubbed at my skin and then at my heart trying to wash away the doubt. In the morning I put her bag on the bus and we stood alone in the shadows. The bus driver, an old Indian with eyes that had watched a thousand goodbyes gently said, “All aboard Miss. Got to get gone now.” She started to cry. I wanted to say something about trying to do something right in a world full of wrong, about courage and what it demands. About the ache that crawls inside and attaches itself forever. But I said nothing. She looked up into my eyes one last time and blinked back the tears then she reached out and gripped my hand, feeling for the scar and what was true between us. Got to get gone . . . Then the bus carrying all I knew of love moved away down Old Hope Road. - - - I walked onto the job site out by the county line to pick up my last paycheck. Some brickers were working on the second story of some office building that would ne...