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A NEW MONTH, a new year, a new decade. Somehow I had convinced myself that by the first Monday in January of 1970, I would feel better. Everything would be better.

Instead, the first Monday had come and gone, and I still had that jangly on-edge feeling, the feeling that I was barely holding myself together, even as the world around me was falling apart.

I opened the window in the living room of my small apartment, then stood back. No one saw me. I might have been the only person in the weekday-empty neighborhood. In cold like this, even the street kids went inside.

The thin January sunlight barely illuminated the three broken-down cars half-buried in snow. The plows, when they bothered to show up, had gone around them. None of the sidewalks on that side of the street were shoveled either. I always felt a moment of guilt about that, resolving to get my son Jimmy and his friends to shovel the walks, and then never acting o