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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
Remembering His Third Wife Never speak ill of the dead, his father always said, and his father was a pastor who preached from the pulpit. That’s why whenever he thinks of his third wife, and he does almost daily, he never says anything bad. Instead, he sends himself an email and records for history yet another evil deed she managed to […]
Read more
An Act of the Will If love’s real, not the puppy kind, it’s not just a feeling but an act of the will a constant giving whether one feels like it or not. After many years you don’t know why you’re doing it or why It must be done. Two begin as grapes purple with passion unaware you’ll be raisins wrinkling at the end.
Read more
Willie in his 80s now hadn’t made sense in years. His wife understood his grunts from the recliner where she propped him up till bedtime where snoring was music in the night. His grandson told neighbors Gramps had Old-Timer’s Disease, an excellent diagnosis with which doctors agreed. It was time to move Gramps to a home so his wife began […]
Read more
An hour a day, sometimes more, I chipped away with mallet and chisel on a block of marble I found in Carrara and shipped to New York on the deck of a trawler. I offered the marble to a famous sculptor who told me he works in granite only so I grabbed his beret and one of his smocks […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
Homer’s never owned a gun, thinks they should be banned along with bombs and missiles. Doesn’t need them in the river that flows between his mind and his emotions where every now and then he pushes someone in for some untoward remark. He points to the sky first, says that’s where heaven is and gives a push […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more