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up. I’d never had a dream this vivid before.
    This was still Frankford Avenue—sort of. The El was still up above me, but the framework was the old green metal one they tore down in the late 1980s. The store windows were naked—not a single metal security shutter in sight. And the stores were all different. Candy shops and children’s clothing emporiums and nonchain drugstores, with hand-painted paper sale signs advertising new products and sale prices taped to the windows.
    More jarring was the fact that my grandpop’s block was no longer a broken smile. All eight buildings were there, constituting a full block. There was a diner. A lingerie shop. The old original El station, with the pizza stand on the ground floor. The bodega on the ground floor was gone; instead, it was an old-fashioned delicatessen.
    This was a dream, then. I was dreaming about the Frankford I knew as a kid.
    But these weren’t hazy, sunbaked Polaroid childhood memories. This was Frankford after dark, and when I was a kid I was never allowed out on the streets of Frankford this late at night.
    I thought about going back inside, finding some dream clothes in an imaginary closet somewhere and coming back out to explore. But even though I was shivering, I couldn’t resist the urge to go exploring right now.
    I walked around in a daze. Frankford Avenue looked more cramped then I remembered, the El not quite as high above me. There were no empty storefronts. There was very little graffiti. This was like a movie set Frankford, built to approximate what it must have looked like in happier times. Was I remembering all of this with any degree of accuracy? Or was I making all of this shit up?
    Somewhere around Church Street, about ten blocks away, I felt something whip around my leg—a sheet of newspaper. My eyes were drawn to the headlines first, but the headlines made no sense:
     
     
    SAIGON ENDORSES NIXON’S VISIT TO CHINA
     
     
    I glanced at the old-timey font on the top of the paper, expecting it to read The Philadelphia Inquirer.
    But instead it was The Evening Bulletin, a newspaper that had been shuttered for close to thirty years now. In the right-hand corner, a black box told me I was holding the four-star sports edition. The cover price was twenty-five cents.
    The date: February 22, 1972.
    Which happened to be the day I was born.
     
     
    The night sky turned a shade brighter, as if God suddenly remembered shit, yeah, morning, better flick the dimmer switch up a little. A dizziness washed over me like I’d been mainlining tequila.
    There were more people out now, rushing past me, and they couldn’t see me—the shivering guy in T-shirt and gym shorts on a freezing morning in late February 1972. They were working-class Frankford people, in coveralls and slacks and dresses, making their way from their rowhomes and apartments to the El station for their daily commute. I wondered what downtown Philly looked like now, in this dream 1972. Maybe I should follow the crowd, hop on the El with them, check the city out. Look at the skyline in the time before they broke the City Hall height barrier.
    But then another head rush hit me. My skin started to itch and burn. I decided to skip my trip down to dream Center City and go back to the apartment…the office…whatever. Maybe Erna was done blowing Mitchell by now. Maybe I could lay down on that stiff-looking sofa and then wake up back in bed with Meghan. I could question the mechanics later.
    My skin was really burning now. I started to worry a little. I didn’t want to dream about burning to death on Frankford Avenue only to wake up with a space heater knocked over on top of me and discover, wow, I’ve actually burned to death. Cue Rod Serling.
    I raced down the avenue, weaving in and around people who couldn’t see me. Only one dude, pushing a broom in front of his corner drugstore, seemed to follow me with his eyes.
    By the time I reached the third floor of Grandpop Henry’s building I was