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
A Facility for the Poor and Demented Fred visits Bill every month at the facility he’s been in for years. Age and booze brought Bill there. He’s still strapped to his bed so he can’t go wandering again when he gets a taste for a beer. Bill calls Fred by name this time and asks if Jim has found a job. […]
Read more
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 […]
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
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
You thought you knew her. She thought she knew you. Neither was true but this happens at times at Happy Hour on Fridays after a long week of work. The rapport was strong. Amazing, you thought. She might be someone you’d see more than once. She had a nice apartment or maybe it was a condo a big double bed […]
Read more
Fifty years ago Jane got on a plane and flew away without saying good-bye. Her parents took her, I know. She was only 14 but she could have said good-bye to me, the swain who saw her through our last three years of grammar school when she wore braces, the only girl who had them. Fifty years later at our […]
Read more
American Innocence, Our Children Now and Then By Donal Mahoney As we know, sometimes we can see the big picture by peeking through a keyhole. And in America today perhaps we can see better the state of innocence among young children by looking at a recent incident in middle America. A retired grammar school teacher, Thomas Thacker, is surprised […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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