The present that I got for Christmas one year was a collection of life gifts that was given to me by a very unlikely soul. I do not know how it came to be that I was chosen to receive such wealth but I have not ever forgotten the preciousness of the gesture, its timeliness, or the look of the man who presented it to me. However, to understand the magnitude of the gifts I received, you might first want to understand me.

I might be described as an independent and rather depressive thinker. When caught in the confines of my own mental wheel of destruction, I frequently spin into a fierce and cynical melee that causes much distance between me and those few who have sought my presence. Outwardly, it would appear that I have isolated myself quite comfortably from all who choose to live. In fact, however, my tortured and solitary existence had led me to the only reasonable solution that I could conclude.

As I prepared to turn on the gas oven, I checked the duct tape seal around each window to ensure its tightness. After years of pretending to be unfeeling, disconnected, and bemused, my life had dwindled to a short note on my kitchen table that voiced nothing more than the obvious, “It is time for me to move past the confines of hopelessness. Do not resuscitate.” I could not bring myself to write my truest thoughts onto the paper. Ironically, this was the fact which most likely brought me to my personal point of desperation.

I made my way through the apartment to be certain that all things were in order before I went to lay my head in the black mouth of the stove. The television softly prattled about nothing I can recall until I heard the words “Avenue H.” I momentarily stopped my wandering and padded toward the set in search of the remote. The sight of my past on the TV in my living room made me smile ever so slightly.

In the middle of a cold blast from the north, Chicago streets can buckle under the pressure of the ice and snow, causing sinkholes and road craters the size of a city bus. Although I had not seen these holes first-hand, there were entire news segments dedicated to the phenomenon, complete with pictures of cars sticking precariously out of the fissures and reporters teetering on their edges. It was inevitable that, at some point during the interview, the camera would pan the crowd and several people of questionable sanity would wave and say hello to their mothers while pointing to the hole in the ground as if to say, “Wow, will you look at that?”

It was this particular news story that caught my attention and made me forget for a moment my Christmas Eve mission. There was a certain sinkhole reportedly at Avenue H on the south side where I had lived as a child. It was on Avenue H that my father had died peacefully in his bed after sixty years of living there. A year later, my mother sat in my father’s favorite chair and, with no warning to the rest of us, went off to meet him, her heart no longer breaking. Every memory of my childhood angst that I could muster came from the vicinity of that house, its backyard and alleyway full of my indelible youth.

On this snowy December evening, the news reporter and the questionable people waving at the camera were standing directly in front of the cookie-cutter house where I had negotiated and finally traded my young years for a professional career and a downtown apartment. I had thought little of our home on Avenue H since my sister, Lisa, and I had buried our mother twenty-five years ago. Now Lisa owns a string of coffee shops in Tacoma and seldom calls to check in but that is another story altogether. Suffice it to say, that was another of my life’s failings.

I glanced at the clock, ticking toward midnight, and tried to shake off the newscast but the sight of my old house and the gaping hole in front of it made me curious. While I weighed the decision about whether to go out into the night or turn on the oven, an odd sound came from directly over my left shoulder and startled me. I snapped round to confront the noise and was surprised that there was absolutely nothing there. The noise began again, this time from my right, and sounded like a word, or words, being spoken, “Cometowherlovanhopabid, Discoallyoevrnednsid.”

“Maybe I am going crazy,” I thought. “How ironic! Let’s see . . . be crazy? Or dead? Crazy? Dead?”