The Artful Trade

The Suddenness of Burt The first time I heard Burt Bacharach I was a kid at a party slow dancing with a girl that years later I came to love. Karen Carpenter’s voice singing Close To You. But it was the sound under the words I felt whispering to me. Telling me something had suddenly changed. Something I had never felt before. Something entirely new that I had never heard before. It was a different kind of song, like it was written with different kind of notes. A new kind of math. The same old 88 keys but, like bricks, erected in an entirely new way. The first skyscraper in a land of Levitt houses. A cathedral rising from the bones of a one room pine pew church. They played the record over and over that night. And I listened to the voice under the voice telling me a secret about love. About what it could and couldn't do. About what I could and couldn’t expect. I felt changed. Suddenly. We are taught that history is gradual. A slow roll of events circling inevitably towar...

It was slow at first. Small towns can carry suspicion and the pastry that peered out of those first floor windows seemed foreign and so in question. But that first year Jack Whitaker’s wife had planned a wedding reception at their house on Elm. Their only son, just 18, was marrying a girl from the next town over. The girl’s mother asked Ms. Whitaker to make the cake. Ms. Whitaker loved her only son and she wanted it to be special so she asked around town and collected recipes and studied them until she settled on one. She gathered the ingredients and two days before the wedding began her labor of love. She measured carefully, greased the pans and stirred the batter as the recipe demanded. When she put the cake in the oven the day before the wedding she was sure it would be the best thing she had ever made. It had to be perfect. Her mother had told her a wedding cake is a sign …a sign of how sweet a marriage would be. And Ms. Whitaker, a sentimental woman, believed it beca...

The Great Replacement The baker, an old Italian man, whispered “I’m sorry.” He had spent his life trying to bring something sweet to the life around him. But that morning all he could taste was the bitter in the words he knew would bring only heartache. When Giuseppe, his apprentice, arrived at dawn he decided it was best to be quick. But as he spoke he felt something in himself sour. “My daughter…she is marrying. Her husband will need work. I cannot keep you both.” “You are replacing me?” Giuseppe asked. The old man watched his young friend tremble with distress, then nodded. He touched Giuseppe’s shoulder but his hand felt heavy and cold. He caught sight of himself in some glass, at the crumble of his own expression, at the disappointment in himself, that he could do such a thing. But what choice did he have? This Depression made even good men cruel. As he stepped away Giuseppe told himself that great things often have bad beginnings. But all he could feel was loss filling...

The Shape of a Ring The train from the island ran in circles, express to midtown at dawn, then back again after the close. The men it carried barely noticed the winter cold or the summer heat as the world spun through each year. In, then back. Day after day, year after year. The older men, graying at the temples, with wedding bands and wingtips, stared out the window as the world rushed by. The younger men, like me, studied the Journal, trying to decipher some simple black and white secret to wealth and the happiness we were sure it could buy. I was a new hire. Still proud I passed the Series 7. Still hungry for the house and the cars, for the wife and the high life. Still sure that success was as inevitable as dawn and happiness was a birthright. I was certain that if you’re smart, keep your eyes open and your head down, it all falls to you. Wealth and happiness and love were all a law of nature. Like gravity. The owner of the brokerage was balding, overweight, fifties. He ...

Many years ago, traveling alone through the west of Ireland, I found myself in a small village called Dungloe. It was Sunday. Though most of the town was closed, everyone I saw was headed to the local community hall. As it turned out, that day was the finals of the Claddagh dancing competition for the girls of Dungloe. In Ireland most girls learn to step dance from the time they can walk. This contest, held once a year for 13-year-olds, is more than just a dance competition. It is a kind of rite of passage, the first tentative steps toward womanhood and all it carries. I had a couple hours before the bus to Dublin, so I followed the crowd to the hall, then up two long stairways to the second floor. The town crowded around a dance floor watching each girl in Gaelic costume carefully tap out the ancient morse code of Ireland. For about an hour I watched the frenetic precision of the dancers. As I started down, I saw a young girl, dressed to dance, on the first landing, clutching the...

The Nearness I grew up just the other side of the tracks, by the railroad, near but always outside the good part of Brooklyn. In those days, my mother would read and reread the travel section in the Sunday paper. About places that were warmer and sweeter. Places promising each week that they were near, or at least within reach. But seeing just how far away those places really were, she would put the paper out with the garbage. As useless as old chicken bones. My father spent his days trying to get near the things he wanted for his family. A better job, enough of the never-enough kind of money, a house big enough to hold his dreams for himself, his wife and young son. Things that were somehow always just beyond his reach. On Mondays when he took out the trash, he would see my mother’s thrown-away hopes for some kind of better Elsewhere. So he would walk the few blocks to the local produce and buy her some day-old roses from the remainder bin. The kind that smell sweet for only a ...