Imagine There's No Heaven

Tim does this thing when he wants me to shut up. Like, if we’re in public and he thinks I’m talking too much. It’s when he thinks I’m talking too much.             Did you see The Shining ? Do you remember how the creepy little kid used his index finger to talk, bending it at the knuckle? Redrum ?             That’s what Tim does.             If he thinks I’m over-explaining or going overboard, there’s the redrum signal.             The last time he did it was about three days ago on the last day of our vacation in New England. He took us to this New Hampshire breakfast spot and we decided we’d all eat like pigs in order to avoid any more meals prior to our afternoon flight out of Boston. It was just the four of us—husband, wife, two kids. This was a childhood favorite of his, and I couldn’t get over the fact that he grew up in this strange idyllic landscape of adorable, huge homes and town squares with bandstands and crazy white churches with pointy steeples. I mean, Rea

            Where does one begin?              With the black doorman, right?             The parking garage under the condos on Astor Street in downtown Chicago smelled of gas fumes, seemed like a secret dark and cavernous world beneath a mysterious city, hinted at a faster pace. Above it—right on top of it—a luxury condo building rose high, scraping a blue sky so to speak, overlooking Lake Michigan with its sail boats and bordering Lincoln Park, which was the site of my favorite zoo—a city zoo—and the botanical gardens where the old man always gave me a fresh orchid to take home. My grandparents moved from Skokie to Chicago in 1976, the Bicentennial, when I was six. Downtown Chicago was glamorous, windy as always, heavy-ladened with a history of fire, of gangster, of race, of politics, of glories. Class consciousness right there. No one told me, no one showed me. They didn’t have to. Six-years-old. The rich, the poor, the black, the white. My grandparents lived on the se