The Man Who Never Runs Out of Ice

It’s the crack of 8 a.m. when the black security gates of Tri-Boro Beverage and Ice roll up with a roar, and Carlo Caraccia unfurls the American flag. He proudly hangs the red, white and blue by the front door that’s plastered with signs: Beware of Dog; Coors Light Mardi Gras and Blue Moon. Guinness, a horse of a Great Dane who’s the color of a Halloween midnight, bounds out as the first customers pull up to the ramp with their empty coolers. Beware of Dog? Carlo laughs. The sign…

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The Evolving Earth Mother

“Welcome to Fairyland,” says Maria L. Delgado. Maria, whose pixie-cut hair is the color of a shiny new penny, is Hobbit-high, so when she opens the wooden gate that towers over her, it is indeed a magical act. In her back yard, there’s a thicket of bamboo, a plot of Russian sunflowers and a crop of corn. In one corner, there’s a gingerbread-style play house that looks as though it ran away from Hansel and Gretel. Next to it are a green-plastic tike table and an ocean-blue…

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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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