Loren Isley is one of my favorite writers.  He is a distinguished anthropologist and essayist.  What makes his writing so gripping to me is that he has the eye of an artist and the soul of a poet.  He sees beyond the surface and he has that rare double gift which enables him to enter deeply into an experience and then share that experience with us in the kind of way that enables us to vicariously experience what he himself has experienced.  In one of his poignant vignettes from boyhood, he shared a moment of time that bares timeless truth.  He was 16 at the time, and one day he leaned out the second story window of his high school and he saw an old junk dealer riding a cart filled with castoff clothing, discarded furniture, and an assortment of broken down metal objects, and the cart was b…