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buildings. Block after block, so close and so tall, these towering brick piles stretched farther than the eye could see. Sometimes, particularly on overcast days, they seemed to lean in on both sides. God help any hapless claustrophobics who might stray here. Entering this shadowy, urban canyon would surely push them to the brink.
    As the yellow cab skirted the endless chain of parked cars that eternally buffer the sidewalk here, Elaina pointed the driver toward our five-story walk-up. The oldest and smallest of all the pre-WWII buildings crowding the block, ours was halfway up on the right. Up and down the sidewalks, on both sides of the street, an entire army of multi-colored children were playing and horsing around. Afraid one of the small, international soldiers might dart out from between parked cars, the cabbie warily pushed forward. As he did, Elaina and I both noticed something peculiar.
    A shiny black SUV, a big Lincoln Navigator, was double-parked in front of our five-story walk-up. Seeing such a vehicle in our neighborhood was quite an oddity, seeing one stopped was stranger yet. Then a tall, well-dressed man emerged from one of the glass and steel entry doors. Like a nervous owl, he glanced quickly to the right, and then to his left. As soon as he noticed our cab coming, he beat heels from the building as if it was engulfed in flames. He hurled himself into an open door of the waiting Lexus, and it sped off before he could even close it.
    “Did you see that?” I asked Elaina.
    “Yeeeaaahhh, that was weird. What do you suppose he…?”
    “I don’t know,” I interrupted, “but he was up to something. I couldn’t make out his face, could you?”
    “No, the only thing I could tell was he was white, middle-aged, had gray hair, and was carrying something dark. Some kind of bag, I think.”
    “That’s about all I saw, too. It looked like an oversized gym bag. And the way it flopped around when he started running it seemed empty.”
    “Oh well,” Elaina said as the cab came to a stop. “Let’s just get our luggage and get upstairs. This has been one hell of a day.”
    After paying and thanking the driver, I climbed out. But before retreating to the trunk for our luggage, I froze for a moment. Still standing in the street, the wind lifting my hair, I pointed at our building and said, “Look, honey! Look what the neighbors went and did.”
     
    “Was that sweet or what?” Elaina said, as she studied the broad white banner draped above the entryway. In large red letters it read, “WAY TO GO, TOMMY! WE’RE ALL SO VERY PROUD OF YOU!”
    In other parts of the country, things may be different, but in New York neighborhoods such as ours, reverting to the adolescent version of one’s name was, and still is, a compliment. Calling me, a fifty-nine year-old man, Tommy instead of Tom or Thomas, was a flattering, familial display of endearment by our friends. Titles, designations, even the Nobel Prize had nothing to do with acceptance or gaining respect on Sampson Avenue. All that counted was how you treated your fellow human beings. I’m honored that all my friends and neighbors always knew me as Tommy. Whoops, I almost forgot. Everybody didn’t call me Tommy. There were a few exceptions. After Enough is Enough was first published, a few of the local teenagers started calling me “The Professor.” That, too, was a pat on the back.
    After slamming the trunk shut, Elaina and I hauled the luggage toward the front door. As we skirted three little girls and their hopscotch game, Manny Ruiz, the building’s superintendent, came out. With his usual after-duty can of Budweiser in one hand, he held the door open with his other for old Mrs. Jacoby, the matriarch of “The Sampson Arms.” Mrs. J had lived three–fourths of her eighty-one years there, and everyone, young and old, treated her with the utmost respect. But that by no means made her a stuffed shirt.
    Leaning on her cane with one hand, patting my back with