Completely in the Dark

The kid’s name was Peter Alyward.

He came from a big Irish-Catholic family two houses down from ours.

I remember only two of his siblings—his older brother Matthew, a stocky, square-headed kid, and their older sister Kathleen, who used to babysit my brother and me when our parents went out. Fairly certain there were two younger kids and one girl who was between Matthew and Kathleen in the family tree.

There’s a photo of all the Alyward kids on Hallowe’en shoving through our front doorway in their costumes, mugging for Mom’s camera. I can see that photo in my mind’s eye now. I have that picture—just don’t have it right here, right now.

There is, however, this photo of Peter (above) between me and Brian, who’s reining in our new puppy, which Brian named Lassie—one of the few remaining pictures of Maryland and the late 1960s.

Peter was a…