At Midnight in New York It’s midnight in New York and in this tall building Herb and Molly are in bed making love. Molly is a virgin and it hurts. Olga’s upstairs in bed with cancer terminal and it hurts. Melvin’s downstairs in bed snoring. Nothing hurts because he doesn’t know yet he has multiple sclerosis. In the hallway a thief goes floor […]
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I bring a milkshake every other week to an old man in a nursing home, a refugee from Germany who paid me 50 cents to cut his grass when I was a kid in Chicago after WWII. I couldn’t understand him then and I can’t understand him now but 50 cents was big money in 1950, 10 candy bars, 10 […]
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When we hire people, we like to know their limitations, said Mr. Acre, commandant of personnel. Look at Phil with his arm and hook. We could see the problem when we hired him. We’ve hired others with limitations not as obvious and that has backfired. You and I have limitations no one can see. If ours were obvious, someone […]
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In 1920 he came on a boat from Ireland and found his way through Ellis Island. He found a room in a boarding house catering to his kind and went looking for a job but found instead signs in windows saying “No Irish Need Apply.” A cemetery asked him to dig graves and lower the dead. In America today […]
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It was an ancient city. All the young people left as soon as they could but the old remained in their mortgaged huts surrounded by evergreens that offered a haven for cardinals and jays, robins and finches. No matter the season birds flew from tree limbs to feed on seed and suet put out by too many widows […]
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They’re usually poor people, sometimes considered the flotsam of society, always in the way at the grocery store, at the post office. They can’t find their money, if they have any. They’re never in a hurry. They have nowhere to go and you’re always in line behind them, a busy man with people to see, appointments to keep, deadlines to meet. You try to […]
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Every summer they come, a ballet over the border, without papers, a mass migration of ruby-throat hummers, beautiful birds that devour millions of flies in North America, birds we welcome because we love their beauty and their ballet. We do everything to help them, hanging and cleaning feeders of nectar to plump them up so they can feast on flies until October when they have […]
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Daily Paper on the Lawn An hour before dawn the paper is out on the lawn white in the moonlight a trumpet dozing after a long night in a jazz bar tired from playing but willing to play a last set for me not knowing I read only sports and the obits two riffs in the paper anyone can believe Author Bio: Donal Mahoney lives […]
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A Stationary Bicycle The doctor tells Phil and his wife he’s in pretty good health for a man his age but he needs to exercise. And Phil says he agrees and then goes on to explain his faith in recliner therapy. He sits in a recliner for hours, watches TV or reads the paper and wiggles his toes at least three […]
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Old Stag Giddy Elmer’s an old stag now shedding antlers snorting among the trees but sometimes Martha after her shower is a doe beckoning and he becomes giddy and heads for the salt lick happy in the breeze [su_mahoney]
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