Aside from the occasional neighbor looking, usually in vain, for a parking spot, the road had very little traffic. Over the fall, a few of the grade school children on the street had started coming out in the late afternoon to play on the relatively open expanse of asphalt, at first hopscotch and soccer and then, as more of the local kids showed up, picking up teams for whatever game was on that day. Today was kickball, bases and home plate chalked on the street. To Glitsky’s astonishment, the wildly disparate group of fifteen or more kids seemed to incline naturally toward inclusivity. The ages ranged from Zachary’s five to Austin Blake’s eleven, and everybody seemed to understand the basic rule that if you showed up and wanted to play, you’d have a place. Even more amazing was the ethnic and gender mix; it didn’t seem a question of anybody’s enforced tolerance so much as a complete indifference to skin tones and accents. Glitsky’s kids were mostly black (with a little Jewish), but the others ran the gamut from Caucasian and Hispanic to at least three different kinds of Asian and subcontinental Indian.
