The Man Who Isn’t Dave

There are some truths that are hard to take. This is one of them. There is no Santa Claus. And there is no Dave at Dave’s Shoes. Yes, owner Morty Kay does answer to Dave, but that’s just because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings or your feet. It’s not that there never was a Dave. Way back in 1947, when Morty was still in baby shoes, a man who would become his father-in-law and a man named Dave Goldberg started Dave’s Shoes. You can call him Dave. When Morty took…

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The Grave New Widow

Marion Duckworth Smith stood shivering in the central hallway holding a candle. Its flickering flames kindled her heart. “I knew that the house had been waiting for me,” she says. “And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to bring it back to life, and it will bring me back to life.'” It was on that cold November night in 1979 that her romance with the house and with the man who owned it began. It was her second date with Michael M. Smith, and he had asked her whether she…

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The Last Comic Riding (A Bike)

SCRE-E-E-C-H! “Oh, no, I think I need new brake pads,” Clark Gookin says in mock horror. He doesn’t mean it to be funny, but it is. He pulls off his white plastic rock-climbing helmet, the one that makes his head look like Humpty Dumpty, and straps it to the handlebars of his bicycle. Clark is long and lean like a telephone line, so he’s not an easy fit for this tyke of a bike that’s the color of a ripe Georgia peach. Clark always goes for the guffaws. Actually, it’s…

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The Young Man Looking for Love

“I can sum up my life in one sentence,” declares Maki Hirose. “I’m a young, straight, very available guy.” “Very” is the key word, he emphasizes. Maki’s a photographer, and he’s shy when he’s not behind the shutter, so his straightforward, single-minded Match.com-like description leaves out a lot of things that need to be included for the sake of total accuracy and complete honesty. Let’s start our Maki snapshot with sweet and funny…

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