The Artful Trade

Amputees often feel a pain from a part that has been taken. It’s called phantom pain. An arm or leg is gone, but the pain in it somehow remains in the absence. A marker of something essential now and forever missing. The body remembers being whole. And pain…that ghostly phantom pain, is the only way it has remind us of all we once were. 1968 is that year for me. The year something essential was taken. That was long ago. But I still feel it. That year in America brought terrible collisions between old virtues and new verities. Truths taken on faith were tested and sometimes failed. Families were shaken to the bone by wars declared and fought in jungles but also those undeclared fought over kitchen tables. It was the year I discovered loss. Not the temporary disappointments or wounds of childhood. The other kind. The kind that climbs down and in. The kind that changes you. It whispers who you were is no more. This year, 2026, has begun to feel like then. I recognize something in i...