TURKEY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He was an altar boy. He played stickball and freeze tag on safe, treelined streets. To hear my dad talk about it, one would’ve thought he had grown up in some long-lost Eden, an urban paradise that had vanished beneath the seas of history, and until his death a few years ago, he held fast to an impossibly idyllic, relentlessly romanticized Brooklyn of the 1920s and 1930s. No matter that his father died in 1925. No matter that my dad went to work as a 12-year-old to help support a family of five. Despite such troubles, my dad’s eyes would soften as he reminisced about weekend excursions to Coney Island, apartment buildings festooned with flower boxes, the aroma of hot bread at the corner bakery, Saturday afternoons at Ebbets Field, ice cream cones that could be had for a nickel and a polite thank-you.

Following Pearl Harbor, my father joined the U.S. Navy. He served on a destroyer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, got married in 1945, and, for reasons unclear to me, set off with my mom to live amid the corn and soybeans of southern Minnesota. My mother had grown up in the area, but even so, why hadn’t they chosen to settle down in a more exotic spot on the earth — the Cayman Islands, maybe, or along the coast of Maine, or virtually anyplace other than the repetitive prairies of southern Minnesota?

I showed up in October 1946, an early explosion in what would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister, Kathy, was born a year later. In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our