At what point do you realize that your parents are old? When they begin to complain about their teeth? When they begin to ask for softer foods and tell you with some embarrassment that they can’t really deal with apples anymore? Is that when you know? Is it when you notice that they are walking slower than they used to or that they begin to look like you remember your grandparents looking? How is it that my mother will always be thirty-six years old to me? And my father about fifty? And my stepfather somewhere in between? How do you deal with the death of your parents? I find that when I am with them I am feeling an almost frantic urge to talk and tell everything and then hold them back from whatever I am afraid of. Of their dying? I want to hold them here now and forever. What happens when they die? How do you handle it? Or do you just gradually realize it will come and hope when it does you have prepared as much as you ever can. It’s only a matter of time.
But now there is the random violence of the Adams Park killer. Somebody is shooting lovers in parked cars two blocks from our house. We are close enough to that park to hear the baseball games. Who is the killer? What does he do during the day? Last night, lying beside each other, feigning sleep and listening with newly paranoid ears to every sound, every crackle of leaves outside the window, every rustle of the curtains. We take Deignan into bed with us when it isn’t really necessary. We feel the need to be close to each other, to cuddle while we listen and listen and listen . . .