The Late Arrival

That smell. That sour-sweet-earthy smell paired with the bite of the mid-fall wind puts me right there on 52nd street on the north side of town. Even as I write this, I can smell it: it's October, and I can almost feel crabapples from the Grady’s tree pop with a thud under my feet. These were all harbingers of winter – the smell, the bite, the pop. It meant things were dying and temporarily ceding their place to make room for blankets of snow. The dying never bothered me. In fact, I looked forward to the smell and this natural cycle that meant backyard igloos, “face washes” (courtesy of my brother) and snow days off school were on the way. Two years after mid-October of 1988, that smell was a punch in the gut. Tears started streaming from some internal well unknown to me up until that point. Evidently, my mom’s diagnosis of liver cancer, her struggling through it for weeks and her death one week before Thanksgiving had tied that smell to that time . That’s when I sta...

It’s beginning to become uncomfortably routine: disaster strikes by either an act of God or deranged person, and then we see them: the better angels in all of us. Celebrities hop on fundraising bandwagons for humanitarian organizations, “everyday heroes” do valiant deeds to sustain people in the hour of need and rival politicians beat their swords into plowshares as the rest of us look on and wonder why it takes a tragedy for people to simply. Do. The Right. Thing. At least I do. I mean, why is it so hard to help? To really look someone in the eye who’s in distress – even a little distress – and help? It’s not for lack of people who are hurting, that’s for sure. Just go to the store. Park your car in the first open space. Grumble to yourself that the space is ten miles away from the entrance and that you’re stuck hauling groceries alone. After working all week. Again. You see her, a woman about your age. She’s crying.   Weeping. It’s that familiar cry as if she’s just fou...