“I was the older of my parents’ two children, their girl, born to a small family in a northern suburb of Chicago, and while Mom and Dad would never have said, precisely, that St. Paul’s would be the making of me, when we had toured the place the autumn I was thirteen, my parents had been so undone that I had seen them, for the first and only time in my life, holding hands. I understood this to be my chance to find my way into my own life. Into HISTORY. Do you see?”
