FOREVER SUMMER
This house exists now only as a mind picture. I haven’t been there since I was a teenager and my childhood memories are more romantic than reliable. My father’s father died when I was 5, and I don’t remember him physically at all. I have his eyes, though; my genes remember. He was a doctor and he and my grandmother lived in a beautiful ranch-style home in Northfield, one of Chicago’s aristocratic north side suburbs. This meant nothing to me as a child, since snobbiness wasn’t my own family’s style. My grandmother lived on in the house for years after...