Blessed is the Memory

This much I know is true: it was the morning after the snow fell, that day when Chicago slept late and woke with uncertain pleasure to thoughts of coffee or tea or hot cocoa, gazing bleary-eyed at the still, white-coated streets; that day when cars were silhouettes of their old selves, like the plaster casts archaeologists took at Pompeii, and every so often you could see an owner digging and scraping with a shovel, though they mostly waited, spending the day at rest, giving way to the sudden onslaught of a forced sabbath. The residential streets were still two-feet-deep, and whatever portions of sidewalk and main roads were cleared — Broadway, I’m thinking of, and Addison and Irving Park Road — seemed mostly for the sake of emergency vehicles that periodically buzzed past, or parked themselves, waiting, in snow-blocked intersections. All the plows were on Lake Shore Drive, excavating CTA buses. Out there, near the lake, the snow was less like manna than arterial plaque finally come loose, lodged at the city’s heart.

And it was this day — because he told me so, and I believe him, regardless of all that happened after — that my father wandered out of his apartment and into the city and was awed by the fact that he had never seen it so still, and, rather than walk straight to shul to say kaddish for Bubbe, he meandered, because he’d left early, and he had time and no reason not to. He stood on the corner of Roscoe and Halsted (right in front of that club where, sometimes at around five or six in the evening, a man in a hot pink thong with well-toned muscles stands on a table in the window and rubs his crotch for all the world to see — just grinning into the traffic, so that you don’t know whether to scream and quicken your pace or to slow down, turn and press your hand against the glass). It was there that my father first caught sight of a shabby figure, standing on the corner and blocking the narrow trench dug out for foot traffic, rotating slowly right to left, left to right.  A black man — leather creases in his face, a worn winter coat with stuffing that no longer puffed against the wind but hung, rather, in disconsolate lumps. In his right palm — and this was what he showed to the world as he rotated slowly in place; this was what caught my father’s attention that morning — lay a blue plastic Star of David, a broken piece of a cheap child’s necklace, with its beaded chain dangling earthward between his thumb and index finger. My father, Roger, saw this and stared, pausing momentarily in the middle of the intersection.

But here is where my knowledge ends and speculation begins, right at the point where it all began. Or maybe, like...