Even though I'm black, and born in Maywood, IL (just a few miles outside Chicago), I've lived with a white, suburban family of German & Irish ancestry, who eventually adopted me in 1999, when I was 10. I've lived in the same house since I was 7 months old, across the street from the Chicago & Northwestern railroad tracks, in the far-western Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Illinois, known mostly for Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school, where my dad taught for almost 20 years & where my mom now works as a nurse in the college clinic. Wheaton is about an hour by car to Chicago, and about 45 minutes by Metra commuter train.

I live about a mile and a half east of where this photo is taken. I actually live closer to the neighboring town of Glen Ellyn, and had I lived a couple blocks east, I would have been going to Glenbard West, as opposed to Wheaton North High School.