12.

I was safe in Janesville, wasn’t I? We were an important place, we told ourselves.

In fourth grade, my teacher Miss Soley put up a bulletin-board display: JANESVILLE’S PLACE IN THE WORLD, her cutout letters said, and those were surrounded by pictures of the courthouse and the stores on Milwaukee Avenue and the offices of Parker Pen out on Highway 51 and, of course, the blessed Chevrolet plant, which assembled millions of Chevrolets over the years.

How could Janesville go wrong? General Motors controlled more than 50 percent of the car market. The company was so self-confident that its executives thought about asking President Eisenhower to drop an atomic bomb to commemorate the completion of their Technical Center in 1956.

Janesville was important, that’s for sure. I already told you once: we were thirty-fourth on the Russian list of cities to bomb.

But then it all went wrong. The Chevrolet plant closed, perhaps forever, at the end of 2008, and there it stands, an empty shell, the sad memento of an industry based on cheap gas and outrageous styling: there it sits, between the Rock River, where the Black Hawk Indian wars were fought in the 1800s, and the house I lived in. It looks, well, almost as if a neutron bomb had gone off there: the building stands, but the people are gone.