These Dreams of You

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But years later, on a night in early November, when the wind comes in like a swarm, Alexander Nordhoc sits in the rocking chair — that he borrowed but never gave back — where his wife used to breast-feed their son.

It’s eight o’clock where he is, in one of the canyons on the edge of Los Angeles. It’s ten o’clock in Chicago, and thousands of people sweep across the TV screen and the same park where, forty years ago, police and protesters rioted at the scene of a great national political convention, and Nordhoc’s country questioned all its possibilities.