Stock characters:
1) man with gangrenous wound.

He said, with exaggerated sadness, as if embarrassed for me, your work is very earnest. 

Your search—iceberg + ronson lighter + beefheart—did not match any documents.

He said that the better you got to know someone, the less you liked them. Animals were the opposite. Of course, you could never really know anyone. Each human being inhabited a vast chasm that could never be filled. The best you could manage was a few shovelfuls of dirt, ten miles away and ten miles down.

“Poland was a rainy place with a lot of crows, man, and it was beautiful.”

He wanted so badly, just once, to know the right thing to do.

Walking around at the end of winter sighting fellow orphans—diminished piles of snow and dog shit—and mouthing a silent greeting. Hello friend, somehow we made it through.

On our last Thanksgiving together my Grandfather Ezra, in his plain dark woolen coat, raised his hand and sanctimoniously asked my father to say grace. After an uncomfortably long silence I opened my eyes to see my parents tightly gripping each other’s hands as tears streamed down Dad’s face.

By Christmas Dad had retreated to the darkened guest room. I didn’t see him for eighteen months. When he finally emerged, he was bearded and gaunt, but seemed at peace. Or defeated. He was 48 years old, and looked 70. My mother had taken a job in a doctor’s office by then. After I went off to college they moved into a small apartment.