We all knew something was not quite right with Mike. What sprang from his mouth had him spending more time in the Principal’s office than in the classroom and angered the older kids, who would periodically lay him out in schoolyard beatings. 1967, the year we turned 16, he climbed the fifty-foot maple just outside the Post Office and neither his father’s threats nor his mother’s tears could convince him to come down. The fly-catchers got him and took him upstate to the red-brick asylum on the river. Mike told me once he felt as if he had left all solid ground behind. “On good days I was drowning— sea-slimed and salted on a relentless ocean. On bad days I fell through the sky like a kite some distracted child had let fly off to be steered untethered by a sorcerer’s wind. I fell and rose, and fell again.” He got worse after he returned— though I didn’t stay to watch his downward spiral. I see Mike now and again downtown. He lives in the half-way house at the bottom of Gray’s Hill and runs errands for a local restaurant. We sometimes reminisce for a moment or two on the busy sidewalk. Gentled now by the years, he always has a kind word and asks about old friends while I search his weary face for the child I once knew.