Sin City In the milieu I grew up in, pivotal events were associated with a particular street or parish, rather than a specific day, month, or year. “Your mother got a reputation for being flighty because of Wendle Street,” a chiding relative would report. What transpired on Wendle Street would go unexplained, as would the meaning of the word “flighty.” “You look like you’re from Fifth and Gybyp” was a popular insult. “Father Whearty got in trouble with the archdiocese, so they shipped him out to Our Lady of Victory” was the sort of unsubstantiated assertion my father loved to make, adorning a quip with the mantle of theory. “Was I born in Holy Child or Holy Angels?” I would ask my parents, ignorant of the yawning socioeconomic gap that divided the two parishes. Dates were irrelevant in such an environment, because everything anyone needed to know was contained in this otherwise inscrutable semiotic code. “Your father started his heavy drinking on Russell Street, but it didn’t get really bad until you moved to Saint Bridget’s,”
