Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met.
It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St Cassian was its usual pokey self that day - a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlours. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda's Drugs. Mrs Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr Kostka's Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger's sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher's battered delivery bike.