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Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

There was nothing in the apartment aside from the desk and chair and piled clothes along the left wall. A monument to bleakness. Even with the passing trains, the place was too quiet. I couldn’t stand being there. I went for long walks, or sat and read at the library. Both were feeble attempts to stave off the inevitable: loneliness in all its many disguises. I missed my mom more than normal. In staying with Jeff I had allowed the past to follow me, a past I wished desperately to forget even with the memories of my mother I still cling tightly to. And the past, for those foolish enough to subscribe to it, holds a grudge harder than anything known to man.

3

That first week, I went up to Gene’s every day. Every day my knocks went unanswered. So did my calls. He was simply gone.

The trains didn’t let up. Only two of the CTA lines ran at night, the Blue and the Red, and it was just my luck that the Red Line was right outside my window. The only consolation was that the later into the night the fewer the trains, sometimes forty minutes between. They drove me crazy, despite serving as a diversion away from the banal routine my life had become. Up at six, to work at seven thirty, leave at four thirty, home for dinner, read for a few hours, then sit around for several more staring at the walls. Day in and day out, that was it. I’ve always wondered why I could never embrace the forty-hour workweek way of life, or at least accept it. But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. A good part of the reason, I’m sure, for my perpetual indigence.

4

Once we moved, it was my grandmother who raised me. I was a young boy in a small town and had yet to start school; I was restless and had few, if any, friends. She was forced into retirement because of her stroke. Because she worked at the same company for ten years—the entire time she lived in Ohio—most of her friends were from there. But few of them, if any, ever visited.

While her mental capacities remained strong, her physical health deteriorated quickly. Her second stroke came a year after the first and severely inhibited the movement on the left side of her body. She could still get around, but it had become a struggle.