Chris sold Christmas trees.

Outside the house there were a bunch of small trees, a little fewer than a hundred I guess. Chris would trim them once in a while, until they got sold at the end of the year. After Thanksgiving people would come and look, some for quite a while, trying to spot the best one to purchase for their holiday celebration.

Chris once told one of them, “You just spent two hours of your life looking at a bunch of dead trees and trying to decide which to give 35 dollars for.”

Before making up their minds, the clients would ask him to turn a tree around to see its other sides. He, sticking to the one bad side, turned himself around.

Later Chris’s mother, a quite poetic woman, put a sign among the trees:

“Christmas trees are like people. They all have at least one bad side.”