"A slight and sinewy man, Mr. Sullo, 69, struck up a...

"A slight and sinewy man, Mr. Sullo, 69, struck up a conversation. A flimsy prickle of a pencil mustache lined the rim of his upper lip, which was, he explained, his ‘nod to Bob’ (as in Dylan). He’d been coming to Masse’s since the mid-’60s. ‘I’m not a religious man,’ he said in the parking lot, traffic picking up as the afternoon faded toward rush hour. ‘I don’t believe in God, but I take comfort in goodness. Masse’s has a goodness about it. It’s not about messing with your head. It’s not about taking advantage of you.’ He talked of photographing the Boston folk scene back in the ’60s, about coming out of the resistance movement. ‘Love, peace, all that stuff is coming back, and Masse’s fits into that groove.’ It’s not a model, he said of the store, it’s a movement. It’s a movement, I was reluctant to tell him, that might have less steam in its engine than Sullo believes.”

For the Boston Globe, I wrote a piece about a hardware store in Cambridge. It was neat to see it in the actual fishwrap, on the front page of a whole section. I’ll just go ahead and say: I’m proud of this one. Give it a read.