My mother tells of having the same dream, all her adult life: it’s night in a strange city, she’s walking, and suddenly she realizes she has no idea where in the world she is. No matter how long and how far she walks, there’s nothing familiar, nothing to give her any clue; this street resembles a block in that city, but as soon as she thinks she knows where she might be something else contradicts it. How did she get here, and where is the here she’s gotten to? The doors don’t open, the streets don’t turn onto any known corner, any landmark of home. And when she wakes she’s just as panicked, just as lost, till she remembers where she is.

There’s a song I like on the radio, “Sukiyaki,” a sentimental ballad sung in Japanese by a male singer, and one day I’m listening to a program where listeners are invited to call in and request a song; the asked-for tune will be played with a dedication, first names only, such as “This is going out from Johnny to Sylvia….” I think of a boy I like at school, a shorter boy with wavy blond hair and a winning giggle, so I call up the radio station. Soon I’m in the car with my parents headed for the shopping center, and suddenly there it is, “going out from Mark to Stevie….” I grin in the backseat, amazed, then I blush. Suddenly it feels too hot, claustrophobic in the car. I’ve written something on the air, all by myself, and it hangs there, almost visible, as if I can see the aftereffect of sound. I focus my attention on the green vinyl of the backseat, the strips of woven upholstery that run up and down. Did I want my parents to hear what I’d done?

That fall we see Martin Luther King on television and my father calls him Martin Luther Coon. My mother says, “Hush, Larry.” I befriend two small girls who have moved into a house across the street, children of black parents who work for NASA. The neighborhood ripples, albeit quietly. Yolanda and Yohanna’s mother invites me to baby-sit, since I am such a nice boy, and when the parents go out on the town (hard to feature, in Titusville), I do my supervisory work with pride: we color, watch TV, have a snack, and the girls are in bed almost on time. I’ve never been in a black family’s house before; it’s odd that everything’s just like our house, only nicer, fresher, as if the operations of the household, its daily maintenance, were conducted with a different kind of optimism, with faith.