Requiem for Blue

It’s been ten years since I drove through that neighborhood and ran across the old man, sitting in the window and staring out into the bleak winter street. Ten years, and I can still remember him as clearly as if it had happened only yesterday, as if I am right now driving up to the old yellow townhouse on Van Buren and seeing him there in the window, his black face ringed with a fringe of snow white hair cut close to his head, not moving at all. 

This is the man in the story, let out of prison in a surprise release the day before after serving thirty years of a life sentence for murder, he is sent to live in a halfway house in his old neighborhood, most of which has been erased by a huge expressway. "Requiem for Blue" is his story.