They’ve both been gone 30 years now, and the store’s been gone 20. When we worked there we represented three different generations, and presented three radically different stories. The Old Bagel was born in Manchester, the one in England, at the turn of the last century. He was well educated there, but he immigrated to Chicago after the great war to work in one of the great, old, clothing houses. The Hardie Boy was a street kid from a dirty neighborhood who didn’t like school much, so he joined up with the army and served on a Mekong gunboat. He was working at the store because he could, in sales, just as he might be selling cars, or carpets. Not much of a vocation, just a job. I was the kid. I swept up, ran the errands, and learned through their stories about the world that once was.

The Old Bagel had invented a shipping box that his best friend co-opted and used to make a fortune. None of this bothered the inventor – he slept like a baby at night, and napped daily in a corner chair behind the size 42 Regular suits. The Hardie Boy was an insomniac, unable to sleep ever since his gunboat was boarded in the black of night. The desperate shooting; he grabbed the deck-mounted machine gun and started blasting into the darkness, may or may not have left some dead sinking into that river.

One was laconic, the other was caffeinated; one was erudite, the other was colloquial. They managed to laugh a lot, and make us laugh with them. Through their idiosyncratic banter they became such a part of the place that I always imagined them hanging around even in death, waiting for me to bring back lunch from the Greek, or beer from the liquor store at closing time. The Old Bagel lived to a ripe old age, but the Hardie Boy died young, of his own demons, in a shrunken space not unlike that gunboat. The space between their deaths was likewise brutally close, but it allowed us to mourn them together, as forever linked, in a way that two souls so different might never be. Even now, it is hard to think of one without the other, and then of the rest of us, making sport of each other, laughing, and finding our way together through a busy Saturday afternoon at Christmastime.

–Danny Grosso

Sand and sea, the colors of life, of everything. The sand is the product of the life in the sea, and the sea finds its rest in the billows and hollows of the sand. Their colors compliment each other like beloved friends at a ceremonial toast. They are the best set. The tan suit in the closet seems to spring to life when paired with that variegated blue shirt. Let’s place this blue rug under this tan sofa and see if it reminds you of something. Yes, it’s the beach, and the holiday, but also something more vestigial; it’s the place we all come from, where everything comes from.

That tension on the waterline, that connection of blue to white, is the crucible we all crawled out of.

There is a certain feeling these colors create together that they fail to create alone. Perhaps they gratuitously provide that lesson to us, about ourselves and our bonds with each other, a lesson that transcends their aesthetic splendor. Or, perhaps not – transcendence may not be for everyone, so let the resplendent visual joy be enough for those that seek only beauty. Like those transcendent souls, the sand and sea await them too..

–Danny Grosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Confirmation Bias

A short creature with a short right leg, this bottom heavy being is always veering off in the direction of its defect. Nearly blind and unresponsive to anything but familiar sensory attractions, it lives an unenlightened existence, ambling in spirals of self affirmation and conspiracy theory. Its acceptance of ignorance borders on gluttony, and it drinks of the empty rhetoric until it is permanently inebriated, pickled even. In this way the wretched creature whittles away its days, until it suffers the mortal wound, inevitably at the hands of its vestigial enemy, the Empirical Analysis, and falls, murmuring outdated dogma, in front of a television blaring an advert for stair lifts.

-Danny Grosso