The Bard in Retail

From there, looking for a job that would pay better than writing poems, which he had no intention of giving up, it was a short jump to a career in the ministry.

"John Donne and George Herbert were priests as well as poets," Reece said. "I said, 'I want to be like them.' " That led to Harvard's Divinity School, where he nurtured the idea that he would become a hospital chaplain. "My father was a doctor. It seemed like that would make sense." But almost as quickly, he realized that at 26 he was too callow to be of much useful counsel to anyone. He collected his second master's degree, this one in theology, but abandoned the idea of the ministry, retreating instead to his family's 100-acre farm south of Minneapolis.

The fields were in a government program that paid farmers to abandon them. Perfect.

Those lines come from his poem "Then." Reece loved that farm and what it did for him as a writer.

Three years I had there. Alone. At peace.

Often I awoke as the light began to cease.

The house breathed and shook like a lover

as I took for myself time needed to recover.

He worked on his father's medical newsletter to pay the bills. He had a basset hound named Bishop ("after Elizabeth'') and a cat named Frank ("after Frank O'Hara). He expected he would inherit the farm, live there forever.

But the family's finances collapsed and his parents began divesting property, including the farm. He hired a lawyer to block the sale. For a period the family members communicated through their attorneys.

In 1994, at the height of the legal battle, Reece suffered a nervous breakdown. At the urging of a friend he checked himself into a hospital. Reece calls it the "nuthouse."

When he returned after 10 days, it was only to collect his things. He gave away his books and his dog. He hasn't seen his parents since.

A Proper Fit

How many people can say that Brooks Brothers saved them?

We're not talking about bailing them out of a tight spot on a business trip, but fundamentally altering the trajectory of their lives.

When Reece left the hospital and then abandoned the farm, he moved in with a nurse who had cared for him. He'd made her cry by reciting an Elizabeth Bishop poem about the art of losing things. She and her husband offered him half of their living room. He supported himself, sort of, with a $6,000 grant he'd received from the Minnesota State Arts Board. When the money ran out, he went looking for a job.

He applied as a newspaper reporter and as a teacher at a prep school. "I wasn't interviewing very well back then," he says.

Reece knew a woman who lived in the small town where the farm was located. She was manager of the Brooks Brothers store in the vast Mall of America, the same store where his father had shopped for suits. Remembering that she'd once mentioned some openings at the store, Reece walked in one day and presented himself.

"She looked at my résumé and said, 'Why on earth do you want to work here?' In a nice way. More concerned, like something might be wrong," he said.

He worked double shifts, sold half a million dollars' worth of clothes the first year, a record for the store. "The job brought me out of myself. It healed me," he says.

In the process he befriended Ralph, the man who would become the subject of "The Clerk's Tale."

My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.

On my cheeks there are a few pimples.