A Bicycle Without a Chain

By Brent Kitching

A Bicycle Without A Chain is the story of David Kingsley's ill-fated pursuit of the American dream. As he powerfully pedals up Mount Success, chasing after athletic fame and material prosperity, the chain suddenly snaps. Denied a place in society that he once imagined was easily attainable, Kingsley suddenly finds his life path unexpectedly circuitous. Over the course of several years he surrenders his veil of invincibility, a foolish posturing that had stripped him of his humanity. He manages to come to terms with his vulnerability as he seeks to understand the complicated nature of evil.

In time he learns to transform his suffering into grace. In becoming a more compassionate, loving person, he is reunited with his soul. While cultivating the still point of his inner garden, Kingsley reaches ever-higher levels of consciousness and the heartfelt conviction that each human being is a very small part of a powerful, sacred energy. No longer obsessed with appearing to be a "winner," he effortlessly coasts into the moment with his heart wide open, living as if perched on the doorstep of eternity. Can a person find a better way of experiencing the gifts available to everyone?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491790991

Brent Kitching

BRENT KITCHING, a former ACC basketball player, is a retired English teacher. He has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a master’s degree from Temple University. In 2009 he published “The Grendel Project”, a science fiction mystery that explores the nature of consciousness while pursuing a life based on the highest ideals. He and his wife, Ute, have three children and reside in the beautiful countryside of central Virginia.

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Prologue

A Request

O n a recent family get-together to celebrate my seventy-second birthday, Serena, my oldest daughter who five months earlier gave birth to twin boys, excitedly entered my study. Before my old legs could push up from the chair and I could give her a hug, she said in a most urgent voice, Daddy, if you don’t write it down soon, the very fabric of your life will-POOF-just vanish into thin air.

She was more animated than usual, her arms and hands swinging wildly as if afflicted by a strange nerve disorder. You know our family history has some pretty big gaps. We know nothing about what happened in grandma’s first marriage, you know … why it was annulled. Nor do we know much of anything about your father’s family. It all is going to get lost permanently if you don’t write it down now.

Isn’t the family tree that my sister put together enough for you? I asked, thinking that the dates and places that Bonnie had meticulously retrieved from old registries and public documents in both Europe and America surely should provide the information that Serena sought.

Don’t you see, records don’t much matter! You can have all the dates of birth and death that you want, but without the stories that go along with their lives, we will never get much of a feel for who they really were. So what if grandma’s father was a printer and died in 1912. That doesn’t tell us anything about him, really.

She paused, settling down a bit and then added, I’m sure someday my little boys are going to ask questions about your life. They’re going to want to know all about their grandfather, not just about your basketball exploits or where you went to college or what you did for a living. There’s so much that I won’t be able to tell them.

Well, it’s all back there peacefully sleeping in the cobwebs of my fading memory, I said with a wry snicker while gently tapping the top of my bald head, and you know what, it probably wants to stay there undisturbed. I don’t see the purpose of digging around in the past. It’s not all that impressive you know, so why don’t we let the ground settle?

Serena, unsatisfied, continued to press the point. Information isn’t nearly as important as the real flesh and blood accounts that make the factual details so much more real. Someday your grandchildren are going to want to know about that writing box, she said pointing to the antique case at the end of my desk. I know you more than once spoke of witchcraft when talking about it or the big English coin that you often rub your fingers over when you write. And there’s the autographed basketballs and ACC trophies on the book selves. All of those things are part of your life from long ago and they all have stories that if you don’t get everything down in words very soon, it will almost be like you never lived. She threw her arms around my neck and before scurrying back to attend to my grandsons, she said, Daddy, please write it all down, please. Then, as an afterthought, while planting a kiss on my cheek, Oh yes, happy birthday, daddy!

Gazing out the window I listened to my daughter’s footsteps as she hurried up the steps. I guess everyone’s past is of some interest to members of their immediate family. I wondered, Does any of this really matter in the long run? Then it occurred to me that I wished I knew more about my grandfather who passed away somewhat mysteriously long before I was born. I’m not haunted by that hole in our family history but I had always wanted a clearer picture of what he was all about.

Some people like walking through old cemeteries while reading all the faded inscriptions on the moss-covered tombstones. I prefer allowing the dead to rest in peace. Besides, the lives of most people are not all that much different. In the end we all have many days of happiness and, if we are lucky, some moments of intense joy. Of course every person, no matter how seemingly successful, has disappointment and bouts of suffering. The details are never exactly the same. We all struggle towards some distant light, a great redeeming dream that helps us through the years while each day holding onto as much happiness for as long as we can. Just the same everything ends.

I looked at my grandfather’s old, writing box resting at the end of my desk. The artifact sat there like the forgotten coffin of someone who at that moment seemed to have never lived. Its mahogany veneer was almost totally hidden by a stack of precariously placed books and a large number of scattered pages, the endless clutter of poems and short stories that I penned with the hope of making some temporary meaning out of the events that I thought of as the life and times of David Kingsley.

My father’s father in my memory was a total void. Long ago he disappeared, relegated as many failed men often are to some distant outpost that falls just short of absolute oblivion. Logically someone sired dad but for all I knew it may as well have been the king of England. As a child I never sat on this forever-absent man’s lap or noticed the way he carried himself or whether when he talked, he looked people in the eye. Did he swagger or was he hunched over by the burden of years of factory work? It’s difficult to picture a person for whom there was neither a reference point nor an actual name. It was only when I was almost twenty that my grandmother made me swear that I would never name my son Jim. It’s hard to imagine hating someone that much.

In our family he was more than anything a ghost with no voice and almost completely invisible. Present or not, my life probably would have played out exactly the way it did. Nevertheless, I always suspected that his genes played a bigger part in the unfolding of my personality and temperament than I realized. Quite possibly, more than any of my forbearers, I resembled most this man who was most conspicuous for being almost totally forgotten. Of course I knew my father and Pop Pop, my mother’s father, but neither said much about their personal struggles as males. At best they were nothing more than silent role models.

On a shelf next to my desk was an old photo, dated 1910, of Pop Pop, the vaudeville strongman. Dressed in a leopard skin and flexing his impressive muscles, he stared off into space, his manly face with its chiseled features as expressionless as the baseball players in the trading cards that I enjoyed flipping as a kid. I witnessed nothing that ever suggested an inner landscape buried beneath the very predictable masculine roles that he dutifully performed. I knew he loved me but he never said as much.

On the other side of several large trophies was an enlargement of my long deceased father, a tall slender man with a slight smile animating his gentle face. Dated a few years after my birth, the gold framed black and white photo commemorated one of his greatest achievements. After eight years in night school and finishing number one in his class, he happily received his college diploma in mechanical engineering from the president of Drexel University. He was a humble person who never complained about daily riding a train to North Philadelphia or his job at Aero Service Corporation nor did he grumble about the mile walk to the station each morning and evening in all kinds of weather.

I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and after several minutes of hunting around, I found the only photograph that remained of my other granddad. It was small and partially out of focus, revealing a slightly blurred profile too indistinct to attach any meaningful significance. Why didn’t he have a place on the shelf alongside dad and Pop Pop? Stranger still, on the back were scribbled the initials JM, followed by the date 1922. Was there some mistake? How could there be an M when our last name was Kingsley?

So I embarked on Serena’s request knowing that every story, even the most ordinary, has some meaning and, just as important, that every narrative, no matter how scrutinized, was fluid and resisted finality. It took me a lifetime to realize that there was no clear beginning nor certain conclusion to the events with which we each identify. A ripple of what was, no matter how mysterious, will always have a hand in what is perpetually becoming. Nobody can fully grasp the big picture but for the sake of a better tomorrow, it is only natural for people to push toward a sense of understanding, no matter how partial. Was not an incomplete, dimly lit picture better than none at all?

With a mixture of excitement and trepidation I set out to disturb the long settled earth around my family’s inglorious past, digging about, not so very carefully I’m afraid, their sleeping tombstones. This account is based on the details and events that have managed to survive in my dwindling memory, my major source of the not totally reliable stories about those who sired me. No doubt the act of removing tons of dirt with the hope of somehow not getting soiled in the process is a foolishly naïve notion that only an extreme idealist could embrace. Nevertheless, I continued this absurd task of trying to properly dress the dead not only for my daughter’s sake, but more importantly for the twins. I hoped that they might gain a better acquaintance with the men in their family as well as the unexpected pitfalls, none of which anyone could be entirely prepared for, that they surely will encounter as the years pile up.

Truthfully, I struggled picking up the old shovel and gouging away at the pretty flower beds, the kind that close relatives of the deceased happily impose on their memories of long ago. Of course the living tend to imaginary gardens as well. I resisted revisiting my unfortunate years, an extended period of poor choices and bad luck. I wondered how my children, happily gabbing away in the living room, might react when they learn that their calm and collected father was for many years an angry male fleeing a tragic past. Would they be unsettled by the agonizing incidents that I never discussed with them? I could only guess at how they might react to the details surrounding the death of their half sibling. There was so much that I had blocked out about my past. Could they understand that in my youth, under the seemingly happy guise of power and success, I was mostly dead inside? Suddenly my brain balked at the chore. No, I’m not going to do it, I thought. It is pointless to unearth the foul smelling corpse of the past. It can serve no good purpose.

With the conviction of proceeding no further fresh in my brain, Bryan, the youngest of my three children, entered the room. Happy birthday, Dadeo, he said while we exchanged a fist pound. Doctor said that I’m a hundred percent, so I put the crutches back in the storage room. I hope I never have to use those suckers again. What a pain! Four months earlier while playing basketball for his work team, the Capital One Wildcats, he had snapped a small bone in his left ankle as he spun toward the basket, a move that he had practiced hundreds of times in his life. A freak occurrence, the doctor called it.

Been jogging every day and in the weight room a couple of times a week. I’m ready to take on the world again. He followed his words with a happy, boyish smile, one that I had seen often over the years, trying to assure me not to worry. His college friends, however, used to say, More than anyone else in the dorm, shit has a way of falling into Bryan’s lap. It was true. He had a dozen or more improbable mishaps. For all of his strength, and make no mistake about it he was a big, strong man, he lived with a childlike naiveté unusual for his age and size. I wondered if all fathers were as concerned about their son’s seeming vulnerabilities.

Mom wanted me to tell you to wrap things up. Dinner is going to be ready shortly. When you get upstairs I want to share with everyone the good news—I have a new girlfriend. I think she might be the one, he said while flashing a boyish grin that called attention to a small scar, the result of a teammate’s accidental elbow, on the side of his mouth. As he returned to the rest of the family, I felt happy for him yet at the same time I struggled to repress my anxiety, knowing how unprepared he might be for the possible emotional turmoil of a serious relationship. How can a father tell a son whom he deeply loves that nothing in life, especially when it comes to romantic love, is ever exactly what it seems? He was a grounded, fully independent and professionally successful young man headed, as we all are, into an unpredictable future. So why worry? Like most young men, Bryan was no better prepared for life’s hard knocks than I was. Sadly, there was so much that I had never shared with him.

As I pictured upstairs the little boys, helpless and vulnerable, fast asleep in their bassinets, the thought of their futures, all of the unknown and very often painful events that they were going to encounter over the years, flashed through my mind. I wanted to be for them the grandfather I never had. I knew that I wouldn’t be there to catch them when they fell. I could not protect them, just as I could not shield Bryan, from the inevitable wounds that all males endure in becoming men. All I could hope was as they grew into adulthood, maybe my story could help them learn about the many unforeseen and usually unavoidable challenges that accompany the masculine journey.

Men have a way of avoiding pain, or so they think. For many years I thought of myself as a rock that could withstand the pounding of life’s biggest waves. Most men desperately cling to such pathetic illusions, beliefs that ensure suffering. But deep down, I knew that I could not shelter Bryan or the twins from their unexpected fates. No doubt they’ll learn that losing one’s way is inevitable. Becoming whole again, I would relentlessly insist, is the real task at hand if one is going to live meaningfully. If I could, I would constantly whisper in their ears, The ultimate pursuit is to seek ideals, like unconditional love and spiritual awareness that can never be completely attained. It’s like riding a bicycle without a chain. Your whole life you’ll pedal and pedal. Sometimes it might even seem like you’re getting closer to your goal, but truthfully, it’s the process that matters most. You see, none of us ever really end up where we thought we were going. So with the fleeting hope that these words might make even a slight difference, I opened my soul to the dark echoes of a largely inglorious past and began to set down this paradoxical account of my life journey.

Because time has a way of slipping largely unnoticed into the future, it occurred to me that I needed to attend not just to the past but to the present, with all of its distortions and self-deception. Although Serena expected a strictly historical account, I was uncomfortable with leaving it at that. The whole process of giving the past flesh and blood is paradoxical. Soon enough this very minute would be swallowed up and turned into yesterday, then last year and eventually last century. In time what I feel and think right here and now, what seems so absolutely certain, will be viewed as questionable by others who lived along side of me. Nonetheless, I must give voice to my current conclusions, no matter how tenuous, rather than, like many males, quietly swallow what might be gleaned from their years of maturation.

Therefore, hoping that first Bryan and later the twins might become familiar with my story, I began the arduous task of unearthing this troubling but ultimately life redeeming tale. In the course of recounting my personal journey, my laborious struggle to move up in the world only to discover that I was pursuing a false dream, I stumbled onto a more fulfilling way of living. I found the courage to take my hands off the handlebar and trusting my future to whatever fate held in store for me, I coasted down from my imagined advantage, and in the process encountered my humanity. I grasped firsthand how all spiritually evolved people are confronted with the demanding challenge of remaining a caring human being while making their way through adulthood and the turbulent crossing of the Great Street of Life.

The Great Street of Life

From the universe’s point of view, the fate of a single human being is no more important than that of an insignificant caterpillar. All living things, as they travel life’s many avenues, are in their own unique manner at the mercy of chance. Any creature that asserts itself, even the most well-intended, minute action, disturbs the order of things and immediately draws attention to itself. No matter how large or thick-skinned, suffering is unavoidable. As each of us attempts to carry out in a meaningful manner our individual pilgrimage, obstacles hinder our progress

Sadly, there are more than enough oblivious truck drivers to crush the daylight out of anything that moves. If we are fortunate enough to make it to the other side by evading the path of blindly driven vehicles seeking their own destinations, then the real process of becoming fully alive and completely mindful begins. In a world obsessed with possessions and power there is no greater challenge than to build an inner cocoon for this most difficult but essential transformation: the enigmatic personal journey toward a higher realm and the task of becoming something more than what we could ever imagined we could be. Finding effective ways of embracing the upper levels of our consciousness brings about the most fulfilling of renewals, the most gracious reprieve from the inevitable wounds we each must encounter in the crossing.

The universe is totally indifferent toward all individuals, but most especially those who hope to exist in a state full aliveness. For those seeking the maximum expression of their deepest being, crossing the street with their eyes on the stars might not only be foolhardy but incredibly dangerous. With enough time and acknowledged pain, a sentient person can learn how to deal with the callous operators of countless frantic cars, all preoccupied with punctually keeping to their tight schedules at almost any cost. Most road damage isn’t by desire, but rather the result of the numbness that inevitably occurs when we lose touch with the moment. Nobody can truly navigate the cramped roadways of life while dead inside. Even more paradoxical is our wish to be on time while traveling to a place where we prefer not to arrive. Such are the usual destinations, the required daily commutes of contemporary life.

Truth be told, the journey isn’t, as most people think, about maximum comfort and continual consumption, the familiar desires that give rise to our state of perpetual drowsiness. Our obsession with endless acquisition only makes the already precarious crossing extremely burdensome and the wayfarer less sentient. Learning to travel light is an absolute necessity and, surprisingly, in the best of worlds can lead each of us to a mysterious state, one blessed with magical possibility. The ultimate task is to transmute the wounds of everyday existence into a source of strength and beauty. Those who learn this redeeming grace find themselves generating from a special place within them a sacred energy that empowers future change. Somehow they discover a way to dance over the cold concrete of seeming oblivion.

Every person is an ongoing but ultimately finite interplay, a unique experimental interaction between a largely predetermined gene pool and the challenges of an ever-changing environment. Each of us lives with partial control and limited knowledge, yet at the same time, each of us is in possession of the gift of free will. Mystics and recluses might attempt to avoid altogether the Great Street of Life, but cross we must.

Burdened down with glittering things and pumped up by over inflated egos, most of us try to escape the time consuming and incredibly challenging task of creating expanded existences. Mindlessly many people trudge to the other side, often strutting arrogantly as if they were someone of great importance. Others quickly dash across the asphalt as if our time on the planet is best spent in a state of frantic activity. On this earthly trip there is no limit to our modes of transportation, from the very practical to the outrageously idealistic. Each journey, however, is carried out by an invisible road map, a set of internal beliefs that can depress our deepest spirit, or in the best of worlds, set us free. It is largely our decision where we want to go and how we might get there. Not to arrive, however, might be no different than not having fully lived.

This is a story about one man’s life, how while traversing the unavoidable highway, he was damaged to the point of almost giving up all hope. Then one day, having had his fill of excessive noise and traffic, how he gradually took flight into the serenity of a spiritual cocoon. It is the tale of an individual, guided by invisible stars and casting his fortune to the universe, slowly being transformed and how he came to understand the miraculous truth that each and everyone one of us, all of life on our planet for that matter, is a very small part of a living, sacred energy of infinite proportion.

Chapter One

High Street

With bicycles pointed to paradise

      We effortlessly pedaled nowhere

            Coasting down long summer afternoons

As time tumbled unnoticed

      Hours somersaulting into eternity

            Aglow in the delight of possibility.

I was a war baby, conceived and delivered during the mid-point of the twentieth century’s greatest bloodshed. At the time the forces of good were struggling to wipe out the armies of Adolf Hitler, a madman responsible for unprecedented butchery. While earth’s most evolved civilizations were in the throes of massive violence with millions of soldiers pitted against one another throughout Europe and North Africa, my parents felt positive enough about the future of America to give me life. The daily reports of battles and their ensuing carnage did not dissuade them and countless other young couples from their dream of starting a family. Although food rationing and personal sacrifice were required from everybody, nothing could deter Marie and Frank Kingsley’s belief that America would prevail. Perhaps this explains how I came by my optimism which on many occasions was foolishly n aïve.

As I look back on it now, it’s funny how incredibly wacky, how completely absurd life can become. I had the good fortune of not living in Europe during World War II. On top of that I was raised by really great parents. Paradoxically, my happy family life was largely responsible for much of my later grief. Unlike my European counterparts, I was not malnourished nor did I suffer from the horrors of constant bombing. Yet dozens of events left deep scars on my psyche just the same. Crossing the Great Street of Life, even when governed by reasonable codes of conduct, can be challenging.

Nothing is ever perfect but from what I can remember, our house was a happy place. Of course my mom and I had our differences; nevertheless, when it gets down to what really matters, my parents gave me a solid beginning. Daily I was nurtured with the security of consistent rules administered by what I later would understand as a mixture of tough love and unconditional acceptance. Bonnie, my little sister, and I were the primary focus of a full-time mother and a hard-working father who was not just completely undemanding, but perhaps tolerant to a fault. As in all families there were plenty of squabbles, mostly between my sister, mom and me, but at the end of the day I went to bed punctually at seven with the total assurance that all was right in the world.

My father was putting himself through night school while working extra hours for a little more income. He was a manager at the Clifton Mills, a factory that made uniforms for the army. Because he had a job that was essential for the war effort, he did not have to serve. With much scrimping and saving we were able to just barely make ends meet. Nobody I knew had much in post-World War II America. Needless to say, we were not the least bit spoiled. Our lives were not just uncomplicated, with no TV, telephone or air conditioning, but downright austere. Things were really tight for everybody so survival was not taken for granted. Most of the time I was thankful that the universe unfolded with a simple order that was as predictable as it was comforting.

Because my sister and I knew no different, we were neither bothered by the cramped quarters of our crowded street nor the continuous commotion that bordered our little lot in life. All day long the trolley passed every fifteen minutes just twenty yards beyond our kitchen window. Yet we were oblivious to the heavy pounding on the brown rails. The unpleasant sound mostly went unnoticed. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, however, with its thundering locomotives and line of clattering freight cars always created a ruckus. Sometimes I put my hands over my ears to muffle the roar.

The other end of the street was filled with activity as well. Route 13, which served as a major highway into and out of Philadelphia until Interstate 95 replaced it, was always well-traveled. As I remember it, the four of us lived contentedly at 70 High Street in a modest, three-bedroom row house with the Turnball’s to the left and the Rosato’s to the right. Untroubled by our circumstances, we were immersed, like everyone we knew, in what today one might consider a near-poverty existence.

I grew up with names like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini being mentioned from time to time. I knew about some of their despicable undertakings, yet somehow I lived with an unconscious trust that the world was a beautiful place. Thank goodness those crazy men didn’t reside in our neighborhood where almost nothing ever went seriously wrong. Most days mothers hung out the laundry, went to the market and cooked the meals. Every man had a job. There were no freeloaders. A decade earlier the Great Depression taught everyone to make do with the basics of life.

Sure, I had an occasional nightmare. Once I dreamt that an intruder was stabbing my mother and father to death. I woke up frantic and ran into their bedroom only to find the two of them peacefully sleeping as the morning sunlight gently streamed through the white curtains. It seems impossible, knowing what I have experienced about marriage, but they never once had a real fight. My father never raised his voice to my mother, nor did they ever say mean things to each other. They really loved each other and I knew that they really loved Bonnie and me. Only years later did I come to realize that every home was not like ours and that all children did not grow up as serenely as we did.

Like my playmates, I saw and heard about some pretty bad things, but nothing compared to the raping and murdering that goes in a real war. Once on the four-lane highway at the end of the street, I heard a terrible screech and looked up just in time to witness a horrible car crash. It was in the dead of August and as I looked at the body on the dirty cement with blood streaming from his head, forming a gigantic red circle under his dark hair, my whole world started to spin. Was this how people perished?

The wobbly rotation that I felt was at first in slow motion, like when an actor you see in the movies is under the influence of drugs or suffering from some type of brain damage. Then the turning became quicker and quicker until I was overcome with nausea and weakly fell backward onto the embankment of a nearby field. When I regained consciousness, there were policemen and firemen around the victim which thankfully kept me from seeing much more. In my childhood nobody that I knew ever actually died.

The Trolley Field, the small half-acre at the end of High Street, was a hub of activity. Once Charlie Carlin and I were hunting varmints with his makeshift slingshot and nails which we took from my father’s old tool box and fashioned into sharp projectiles. His very first shot ended up in some flesh, but not the squirrel’s that he was aiming at. The sliver of metal was about an inch deep in Charlie’s arm. I just stared in disbelief and then he realized that there was a nail stuck just below his elbow and he started to really bawl.

The following year my sister was climbing a tree and fell out. I tried to catch her but she went right through my arms and broke her wrist. I remember the ambulance and the anguish on mom’s face. I guess none of these things were too serious because in no time Charlie’s wound had healed and he was out shooting at squirrels. When Bonnie had her cast removed, she was no worse for wear. I never saw the man in the accident again but my mother told me that according to the local newspaper, he lived. Somehow everything seemed to turn out alright.

A lot of crazy things happened when I was young. Yet even when life got totally screwed up, I always could come home to the safe haven of our small row house. It was only twenty feet wide and attached to dozens with exactly the same interior lay out and common exterior, but it was the most special spot in my world. Didn’t everybody live in a row house? I took comfort in knowing that the trolleys would be running punctually on the quarter of the hour and the Popsicle man, a slender fellow with a broken smile, would be driving through the neighborhood each afternoon. Even though we never had money for a treat, life was all right. Growing up, I mostly inhabited what I now think of as a make-believe universe where every tomorrow was expected to be filled with plenty of sun and blue skies. Usually it was.

One event caused me to have nightmares on and off for the better part of a month. It occurred in the trolley station that abutted our field. Walter Griff Griffin, Charlie Carlin and I, as we biked around the neighborhood, often wandered into that old, brownstone building. There, sometimes Charlie would find the stub of a dirty, discarded cigar, and stuff the brown wad of tobacco into his mouth, while prancing around like a grown-up. I still don’t understand why he never got really sick. The way my mom talked about germs, he should have died on the spot.

But an even bigger mystery obsessed us. One autumn afternoon a large, black footlocker, strapped together by several thick leather belts and secured by two, shiny padlocks appeared in the far corner of that damp, dark chamber. Immediately it became a new plaything. It was far too heavy to budge, so we took turns trying to bust into it. We kicked it until our feet hurt. We thumped on it with a big stone. We slapped at it with an old axe that Charlie brought from home. Nothing damaged it. Griff suggested that we blow it up with a cherry bomb, but he didn’t know where we could get one. We enjoyed imagining all sorts of curious treasures hidden within that unusual container. For the better part of a week that immovable rectangle was the focus of our daily activities; then, just as puzzling as its out-of-nowhere appearance, it was gone.

A few days later Griff told me, There’s a man all cut to pieces in the box. I didn’t believe him! It didn’t make sense. Why would anybody hack a man to bits and stuff him in a chest? The very next day my mother read to me a newspaper report. Even now the gory details send a chill down my back. A butcher, after a night of heavy drinking, went crazy, killing his drinking companion. Nobody knew why. After he chopped him apart, severing his head, hands, feet, he carefully placed his friend’s torso and the rest of the leftovers into the sturdy foot locker, guessing that nobody would look for it in the trolley station.

In the grayness of the ensuing early autumn evenings, I often visualized the bloody visage of the deranged butcher. With a sinister smirk on his face and a reddened cleaver in his hand, I imagined that he was coming for me. In the weeks that followed, I could see his bedraggled form slouching down the back alley. Here and there the madman hid behind large, tin garbage cans or leaned against back doors to see if they might open. Most perplexing, when I strained my ears, I could clearly hear his furtive footfalls. He was slowly climbing the basement steps, then quietly passing through the living room. Now, certain that I feel his presence, patiently he was waiting just outside my bedroom door. If I were to fall asleep, he was sure to split me apart. Often I played dead, holding my breath, trying to convince myself that he wouldn’t bother with a corpse. Only after nights of troubled rest and numerous requests did my mother place a nightlight in the hallway. After a while, thankfully, Mister Death, as I thought of him, stopped visiting.

Even with an occasional frightening nightmare, I still believe that I had the best of childhoods. I bet there were twenty kids on my block, each within a year or two of my age. It was a carefree time when parents didn’t have to worry about strangers abducting their children and most people didn’t even bother to lock their doors because everybody lived from paycheck to paycheck. When school was not in session, High Street was usually filled with the buzz of constant activity, a hodgepodge of stickball, step ball, tag, hide and seek, hopscotch, jump rope and during the winter months, snowball fights, ice houses and sled rides. Almost nobody had a TV, so kids stayed inside only if they were really sick or being punished.

My little world was mostly innocent. When Griff got whooping cough, his house was quarantined, but he was back playing with everybody after a couple of weeks. Although there was lots of talk about it, nobody got polio or any really bad disease. I never heard of conditions like childhood leukemia or autism and none of