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What defines a person? Is it our DNA, where we grew up, or is it the family we are born into? I am struck by the question of what is an identity. Who are we without the people, places and things that surround us? Does my name define me, the place I live or the family I come from? Does my country or the planet define me? Who does God say I am? Will that answer suffice when all around me seems changed?

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Growing up in Astoria the rats were bigger then cats, a major heroin ring ran from a local diner, a porn ring was exposed across the street. Upstairs a Satanist lived for a bit and a minor league drug dealer lived next door. The local chicken joint was in trouble for using the more voluptuous river rats instead of fowl for deep fry.

Surrounded by factories and lower and middle class families, the apartment building where I grow up was already a hundred years old. It was one of the first apartment buildings built with gardens in the back. Originally it had gas lighting and no bathrooms. The bathrooms were added later and formed columns in the back of the building. There was no insulation to speak of and winters we chipped the ice from inside our windows. In some ways it was like living in the Wild West; rough and untamed. But it also was the place where I grew up. Behind the yards there used to be stables that my father worked in as a boy. Just outside, set into the sidewalk was a horseshoe marking the spot. Later my father would plant a tree at the place where the entrance used to stand.

During the hottest part of the summer I brought my niece to see the building where her mother and aunt had grown up. My friend Patrick was there too. He had wanted to see the river rats I written about in our writing classes. My old apartment took an active place in my dream life. At times holding all the fear I felt there and other times the memories. Often I would dream of my mother, sick and frail and my first dog Bella, living there alone and forgotten in the back room. In the dream I would live near by and with horror realized I had left them alone. I found them OK but could never get over the horror of forgetting them. The dreams began to change and suddenly this dark and desolate place began to shift and I was living there again. The apartment now nice and livable and my mother and dog finally at rest as they should be.

I had heard rumors the place may have been torn down. The dreams prepared me for the rumors but the reality did not. My niece,

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