The Minimalist shopkeeper.

A short tale

Once, the son of a shopkeeper fled his father’s home and business, since he was sick of the miscellaneous demands and inconveniences of both. Eventually, he settled down in a city, to live as a busker who played songs and sold hand-painted cards on a street corner.

Eventually, his father found him. Disgusted, he asks his son why he would abandon the security, respectability, and wealth of the shopkeeper’s profession to become a beggar sitting on the pavement?

“No longer a shopkeeper?” The son replies, “I’m still a shopkeeper now! The only difference is that I’ve stripped myself of all my profession’s usual and cumbersome appendages, such as the store, desk, cash till, and stockroom. I’ve instead reduced my profession to its barest minimum, its essence. The entire street is my store, my backpack is my stockroom. My prices are so simple, never more than $10, that calculators are unnecessary. My wares are reduced to two things, rather than your usual multitude requiring so much space to store and so many records to keep. And due to all this, I have less expenses and more profits. I am still a shopkeeper, father, but a minimalist one.”

I came up with this short tale, in the spirit and style of those traditional ones that have been told orally across human history, and which have more recently been written by authors such as Tahir Shah, as I was reading the first part of Robert Scotto’s biography of Moondog, who left the security of his family to spend most of his life busking in New York, selling music and poetry. This is my first work of fiction that I have published on Substack, and it may not be my last.