I published a true, inspirational story on this blog on July 4, 2008:
Depression, Despair and the Human Voice, https://www.differentslants.com/?p=72
(If link doesn’t light up in blue, try cutting and pasting it)
It has become one of the most visited stories on Rick’s and my blog, to date. Many, many people must know someone who suffers from the tyranny of depression, and that frank, unfiltered stories can help explain what it actually feels like, from the inside out.
Here is one more incident that I left out of this story. I am adding it at Christmas time, 2008, because it serves as a reminder of how good strangers can be. Sometimes, we all need that.
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There was a small fresh fruit and vegetable store in Hyde Park, in 1978. It was under the Illinois Central Railroad tracks and did a good business with the commuters rushing to their jobs in Downtown Chicago. There was a bright, colorful public mural of grapes, apples, pears, carrots and so on painted on the brick exterior wall of the shop that faced my newsstand, just west of it, across Lake Park Avenue.
The owner was a short, stocky, Black and muscular man. He worked hard, all the time. We didn’t talk, but we nodded to each other when we caught each other’s eye. I knew his name was James. He was kind of reserved. I assumed he was wrapped up in his own world of business and other problems and not in any way aware of what I was involved with in the hostile world outside of intimate Hyde Park. He had a formality about him, a kind of dignity. But we weren’t friends.
The only indication James might have had that I was doing something besides selling newspapers on that corner was when my enormous black and white Gulliver’s Periodicals truck was parked outside of the store loading or unloading bundles of thousands of current magazines. The brick newsstand also served as Gulliver’s base of operations, initially. (Read on …)