Tag: donal

A Good Customer I saw Al once a month for 30 years, maybe more, doing business together. He retired to hunt bear  in Alaska, hook Tarpon  in Florida, golf in Scotland. He had it all planned. Nothing would stop him.   Months later I learned doctors said he had cancer of the blood. The outlook was bleak. I called Al and he said six months, […]

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 […]

Plain Girl Pretty Rose was a plain girl from a small town. She sang in the choir, never missed Bible study, left for the big city after high school.   She worked nights  in a shanty diner next to a bar where working men gathered. Depending on how much the men had to drink Rose looked appealing but she ignored […]

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

Young Priest, Old Priest   Everyone in the neighborhood was surprised when Bill McIntyre entered the seminary to study for the priesthood. He had been dating girls since early in high school and had been engaged since graduating from college to a lovely young lady. He often spoke about wanting to have a big family since he himself had been […]

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 […]

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 […]