It’s my fifth birthday & I’m sitting on the present that Uncle Stan has just given me, a green Schwinn bicycle. He gives me a push & down I go, down the gentle slope in his back yard in Chicago that becomes a hill, an interminably long hill that, sixty years later, I’m still going down, the bicycle having become rusty & dilapidated but still capable of moving as fast as the wind. Fortunately the doors, front & back, of the houses I’m passing through are open & the corridors unobstructed, the people, my friends & relatives, in the rooms on either side of the corridors going about their business as though I don’t exist: Aunt Mary & Uncle John sitting at opposite ends of a long table, John’s prayer of thanksgiving going on & on while the roast beef gets cold; Aunt Jane having one of her fits in the kitchen while Uncle Max looks on helplessly; cousin Dan & his new bride, Eleanor, banging away on a hide-away bed while the radio newscaster tells us that Normandy has just been invaded – D-Day. Over a hundred houses & I’m still going, Uncle Stan passing away at the age of ninety-two, the war in Vietnam grinding to a halt, the Berlin wall torn down brick by brick as I roll by on the Schwinn wondering how the hill has managed to descend through seventy-two countries on five continents – a mystery I’ll never have time to fathom because there, at what appears to be the bottom of the hill, is an open grave, half a dozen people standing around it as though waiting for a hearse to arrive.