"Don't you get my Irish up," yelled McFadden, his arms windmilling erratically as he stumbled toward his son who easily dodged the old man.

Game shows, the obituaries and her neighbor's every movement filled the bulk of Glenda's days.

The candy apple red Cadillac that had once been the glory of State Street now sat on blocks, a rusting hulk.

They watched in horror as he picked up the steak with his hands and swallowed a large chunk of the meat like a crane ingesting a koy.

The house was a hive, a constant humming of comings and goings that drove their neighbor Al to contemplate killing.

"It was a tit-for-tat with a rat-a-tat-tat," Smokey told me, a thin smile briefly crossing his pallid face as we lay in the hole.

Burt's love of the English language landed him in front of Judge Stewart twice in one year:  once for vandalism stemming from the correction he made in spray paint to a shop sign that had misused an apostrophe and a second time for a fist fight over the correct spelling of "encephalopathy" with Burt getting 30 days in jail in the second case after correcting the judge's pronunciation of "battery," as in "assault and."