5

	school. I stepped into its corridor (which I didn't really remember) and there were these middle-aged women there whose fuzzy faces glared at me. I tried to explain that I had gone to school there twenty years before and I was interested in seeing the old place again and did they know the names of my old teachers -- I mentioned the names. But I felt uncomfortable because I kept squinting at them and they didn't invite me in. They didn't know my teachers either (well, it had been over twenty years, right? The whole thing was silly). So there is just one place left to visit in the old neighborhood, right? My home. Actually, my apartment building. As I limped in its direction I thought about how I would have liked to sit in the classrooms just for old time's sake. But I wouldn't have fit in the chairs I guess -- and the other children would have been upset anyway. Hold me. And then the ending of the story came to me. One day he would give up in despair -- no one ever believed him; who pays attention to the poor pigeons? -- and he goes home, sits in a chair and never gets up again. Family comes to visit him, and some friends (he has a friend or two I guess) and he smiles when they talk to him, but he never speaks and never gets up. Silly ending. I guess I thought of it because of the chairs in the classroom. So I stand in the courtyard of the apartment building for a few minutes. I didn't go in. (What for? Why did I even come here?) So as I'm leaving the courtyard this fellow approaches me -- a little balding guy who is retarded. Mildly retarded I suspect. (You can tell that sort of thing by the wrinkles on their faces -- they're always in the wrong places.) "What do you want?" he says to me. "Well," -- I said something like this; I don't really remember the exact words -- "I used to live here when I was a kid, when I was about eight; I just came back to see the old neighborhood -- nostalgia." I wondered if he knew what the word meant. He looked at me a moment and then said, "Yes. I remember you. How have you been all these years?" I said that I had been all right and he walked into the building. I was a little bewildered until I realized that I actually did know who he was. When I was a kid, the superintendent of the building had a retarded son (I remember my mother complaining about him: he