The Artful Trade

Veterans Day Dear Dad, You lied about your age.. you were just 16...so you could enlist. You were shot in head and left for dead alone in a ditch in a winters woods of France. You prayed to the Blessed Mother for one year with that girl in NY. And somehow you survived and came home. Her family said stay away.. hes a crazy Irish man who was shot in the head. But she decided to listen to her heart instead of them. I'm pretty glad about that...otherwise I'd be some old whisper in the wind instead of the word chaser and bellower I've become. You were married for 66 years and would have been for another 66 if flesh was as strong as feeling. Anyway...proud to be your son. Hope your dna wins out over my hubris...i can feel it sometimes swirling way down deep in me. Your grateful son

A Hard Dog When I lived up in East Nash there was a pack of abandoned dogs that ran that part of town each night. My street dead ended against the highway and they would gather together and listen to the sound of tires on the asphalt and AM radios all trying to get someplace else. The guy that lived next door worked as a lineman for the electric company upgrading wires and boxes and repairing down cable when the wind blew hard. That spring the wind kept pulling it all down. He was the kind of guy that did his 8 and 40 and 365 then came home and tried to find some happiness and love in the overtime between shifts.  Then each dawn he would climb into his rusty truck and go out trying to repair whatever got torn down in the darkness.  That year he had met this girl, a kind of stray, and she eventually moved in.  I guess he was trying to save her or maybe just himself or both. He asked her a couple times to marry him. But she always said she neede...

Someday I’ll Learn to Fly  Will Maguire   copyright@2018 Once there was a jungle and in the jungle was a river. And the river was full of mud. There each day a herd of rhinoceros swam. Among them was a very young rhino and like all rhinos he played in the mud and ran with the herd.  But at night when the jungle was quiet, flying high above the river, he could see birds.  One day he asked his mother  ‘Mama…will I ever fly?’ She shook her head “No son. The birds have the air and we have the mud.” “No rhino will ever fly.”  And the young rhino was sad. That night he awoke to the sound of a great wind and a light like a star in the sky. And high above the jungle, flying like a bird, he saw a very old rhino.  The next day he told his father  “Last night I saw an old rhino fly away.” “It was just a dream son. No rhino will ever fly.” his father said.  "Be grateful for the mud.” ...

Heart Failure     copyright@ Will Maguire At 39, in his artistic prime, the composer Frederick Chopin began to feel a nagging and then constant ache in his chest. That year he had been in a tempestuous and ultimately ruinous affair with a woman, but only later did it become clear that the pain was a medical issue. She loved him, but Chopin lived the financially insecure life often demanded of an artist.  So she gave herself to a man who could better provide for her and they both went on ruined in the way that love can ruin two souls simply by the knowledge of each other’s existence. She became someone else’s wife and then a mother and lived with a tepid affection for her innocent husband, haunted by that rare Supposed to Be passion that she had given up. Chopin for his part took what was given, which is to say what was taken, and used the longing to forge a new kind of music.  It was the sound of a heart fractured by its own feeling.  Later that year, over...

Mother's Day The last time my mother knew me was a few years ago on Mother's Day. She had started forgetting and remembering in the wrong order. Forgetting the things around her, remembering the distant past...like Time was suddenly dyslexic. They had her in this hospital ward for the elderly on some back street off the main drag called Memory Lane Memory Lane would be funny if it wasn’t so cruel. Sometimes living's the same way. She kept asking for a mirror but didn't recognize herself anymore. She was 17 again but trapped in an 80 year old body. A young girl staring in disbelief at the person she would become. She didn’t know her husband or daughters or sons anymore. Some days she thought I was her long dead uncle or her brother. And near the end she thought I was her father. She pleaded with me again and again to let her see that Irish boy that was just back from the war, the one that got shot in the head and survived and kept knocking on the door...