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...