This is another story about growing up in Itasca, Illinois in the early 1960s. Like Fallout Shelter, it’s a story of near misses and ‘what-might-have-beens’ in our lives, juxtaposed against the stark, sobering realities of the direct hits we usually never see coming. This is the first of a trilogy of stories about my reconnection, 42 years later, with some of my closest friends as a child and teenager. I wrote McKenzie’s Field nine months after our son Jimmy died, and a year before some of my old friends began dropping back into my life, and I into theirs. It would take another two years for the seemingly random pieces of these stories to knit themselves together and leave us all shaking our heads in utter disbelief—and shear wonder.