Life's forgotten become family at Pine Street Inn

I should have counted the steps from the Herald. It couldn't have been many. It was no more than a five-minute walk. And yet the walk took me to the other side of the world. The Pine Street Inn isn't on Pine Street. It's on Harrison Avenue, in an old building that looks like most old buildings in this city, brick on the outside,cinder block on the inside. I arrived there with preconceptions. The homeless are alcoholics, drug users, people who have…

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We're guilty of wanting more

He told the story earlier this week and he told it well, the way he tells all his stories, because he is Irish and strings his words together with a natural lilt and good humor. He told it matter-of-factly though - it was almost a "by the way." And yet within the tale there was a story-teller's sense of plot and tension and, of course, the inevitable, inescapable moral: There he is on a glorious September Sunday, he says…

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If I want to be good, I have to practice

If I want to be good, I have to practice

Every afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano. "So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care. "Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day. "How'd you do on your vocabulary test?" "We didn't have it. Wanna' hear me play Remington Steele?

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