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The Pencil Seller
When I was a boy, I used to see an old blind man outside the Kress’s store on Main Street in our town. He would sit on a little chair outside the back entrance, wearing his dark glasses, his white cane propped against his leg. He would hold out a tin cup and would extend a fistful of white pencils in the other hand, all the while hawking his wares with his impeded speech. He would say “PEN-suls! PEN-suls!” over and over. Every once in a while, some benevolent soul would stop and say “I’ll take two,” etc. and drop coins into his cup. The old man would nod in…
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Answering For It — REVISED
Near my job is a building I pass every day. A low-slung affair in the middle of an over-large parking lot, it resembles a bank or a real estate office. The grounds are aggressively landscaped, deliberately shaded with ornamental trees, marked out by mulched quilts of annual flowers and bright shrubs. There are always cars in the parking lot, even on the weekends. The building is a nursing home. Most mornings when I pass, the front lobby isn’t fully lit, and there are few signs of activity behind its glass walls. But along the exterior walls there are many windows, and the windows are almost all fully lit, even in…