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We’re sitting here on Sixty-third and Central Park West, at the New Yorker Festival, for God’s sake—the red-hot epicenter of somebody’s nightmare somewhere.

What accounts for this horrendous polarization, in which Sixty-third and Central Park West can barely understand rural Indiana, say, or any other—a lot of other places that one could name?

These, of course, were the first moments of a blackout that darkened not only Sixty-third Street and Broadway, where we were eating, but a long swath of Manhattan’s West Side, affecting more than seventy thousand Con Ed customers.

Trains ran in and out of Englewood constantly, streetcars started operating in the neighborhood while Holmes was there, and he might have even seen an automobile go by on Sixty-Third Street every now and then, but horses were still essential to everyday transportation.

In May, 1998, two weeks shy of his sixty-third birthday, Mel got a pass to leave the hospital and hitched a ride to Woodridge, thirty miles away, a town that, unlike Steinbach, the train passed through.