Walking very slowly, ancient Wall… right behind his ancient Molly who… stepping down the garden path, her first time out in weeks, wobbly still on her new knee.

Many years later when I meet her… on my way out of the Russian Tea… I notice how beautiful she is dini… a man more attentive than I was ba… But I see chaos dancing in her ey…

I don’t know why my wife and I are up at four in the morning sitting in recliners drinking coff… staring at half-hour commercials claiming to cure everything

You can learn a lot, both true and false, in a dingy all-night diner where old men gather at a table in back

It used to bother me to see odd people leapfrog parking meters and shout every day is Halloween until

The priest had been here earlier a… and relatives and friends in singl… “Sorry for your troubles,” one by… bending over Maggie Murphy, silen… a foot or so from Paddy, resplende…

The weekday Mass at 6 a.m. brings old folks out from bungalows around the church. They move like caterpillars

A tractor trailer with slats and m… pulls up at a city slaughterhouse. The driver pulls the wrong lever and two thousand pounds of trotting cattle go for an easy

Only the blind man with his leader dog and tapping cane stops when the homeless man standing near the curb

That my parents were Irish immigrants is probably the most significant factor in my writing life. The English expelled my father from Ireland around 1920 at age 18 or so for running gun...

One, a nun, has her transfer in her hand. She’s silently praying. Another, a hooker, has her income in her purse.

There are good souls who say poverty need not always be with us who say there’s a way to make it disappear

Strapped to his bed in the nursing home, he tells every nurse who comes in and tightens his straps

This senior citizen whose face is Rushmore still squats with pigeons on the steps of the Rogers Park Masonic Templ… She wears a shawl this snowy day