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5

y mother ultimately did go back to work, right about the time I began
high school, catapulting herself out of the house and the neighborhood and into
the dense, skyscrapered heart of Chicago, where she found a job as an executive
assistant at a bank. She bought a work wardrobe and began commuting each
morning, catching the bus north on Jeffery Boulevard or riding along with my
dad in the Buick, if their start times happened to line up. The job, for her, was a
welcome shift in routine, and for our family it was also more or less a financial
necessity. My parents had been paying tuition for Craig to go to Catholic school.
He was starting to think about college, with me coming up right behind him.

My brother was now full grown, a graceful giant with uncanny spring in his
legs, and considered one of the best basketball players in the city. At home, he ate
a lot. He drained gallons of milk, devoured entire large pizzas in one sitting, and
often snacked from dinner to bedtime. He managed, as he’d always done, to be
both easygoing and deeply focused, maintaining scads of friends and good grades
while also turning heads as an athlete. He’d traveled around the Midwest on a
summer rec-league team that featured an incubating superstar named Isiah
Thomas, who would later go on to a Hall of Fame career in the NBA. As he
approached high school, Craig had been sought after by some of Chicago’s top
public school coaches looking to fill gaps in their rosters. These teams pulled in
big rowdy crowds as well as college scouts, but my parents were adamant that
Craig not sacrifice his intellectual development for the short-lived glory of being
a high school phenom.

Mount Carmel, with its strong Catholic-league basketball team and rigorous
curriculum, had seemed the best solution—worth the thousands of dollars it was