“They were good up to about 14,” said Mattie Ashford, 77, who helped raise them after their mother died when they were 3. “Then they started running with the wrong crowd, getting into trouble.”

So says the grandmother of twin 17-year-old men, now both in jail. One brother was charged Wednesday with murder in an iPhone robbery gone wrong on the el. The other acted as his lookout and accomplice in a series of robberies across the city.

Read the rest of Jeremy Gorner and Jason Meisner’s impressively sad Chicago Tribune story on the case.

Here’s something I wrote about a month after the 9/11 attacks.

---

The Page

A month ago, my TV caught fire
With the explosion of a new age
The smoke and ash of dying dreams
Buried the remains of a scattered page

On that page was written the record
Of a trial, a trade, a law, a life
A deal gone sour over mislaid details
A string of betrayals by a faithless wife

On that page was written a telephone bill
For the last desperate call that was made
To her husband’s answering machine
Before she fell victim to a box-cutter blade

That page laid out the measurements
For an insured engagement ring
Thousands died for a political world
But they never did a goddamn thing

On that page was printed a forgotten e-mail
“I’m sorry, honey, for the things that I said
In the heat of the moment, I let my tongue slip
I’ll do better, I promise,” was the way that it read

That page was trimmed with the threadbare
Lives of men and women I never knew
It was soaked in the searching tears
That I spat out so hard for you

A month ago, and that page has been printed
A trillion times over with words bitter and rank
To describe the evil that brought down the ash
A month has gone by — and the page is still blank

– 30 –

This view is just a hint at what lays in store for you at Sherwin on the Lake. I’m moving in July, and my apartment will be available for rent starting in August.

It’s a one-bedroom beachfront condo in Rogers Park. To find out more about this great place, please visit this website I’ve created to promote the apartment.

Update: The apartment has been rented.

As some of you may already know, I got engaged last week. I proposed to the smart, funny, gorgeous Elizabeth Harding last Saturday morning after a walk along the lake. I was delighted when she responded: “Yes, I will marry you.”

There is no date yet for the wedding, and we are not in any particular rush to set one.

Elizabeth is a Unitarian Universalist minister. Right now, she is consulting minister at Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Grayslake, Ill. You can read some of her sermons here.

Interestingly, Elizabeth and I have known each other — after a fashion — since we were 4 years old. We attended the Inter-American Magnet School from preschool through the eighth grade. I can safely say that we were not close back then. If we ever exchanged more than a few sentences of conversation during those 10 years, I’ve entirely forgotten them.

But you seemingly cannot maintain any presence on Facebook for long without your past creeping up on you. In this case, it was a benevolent creeping. Once the number of Inter-American grads who had connected on Facebook reached a tipping point, it was clearly time to reunite, albeit unofficially. Elizabeth did not attend the first get-together, but she did make it out for a second reunion last June. Lucky me!

As we milled around Navy Pier before heading to the Reagle Beagle (which I recommend for kitsch value alone), I explained to Elizabeth that I had taken to using Twitter to explore important topics such as my need for a system to tell apart my black dress socks from my navy blue ones. She laughed.

You know, when a pretty girl laughs at your jokes, she has a way of getting your hopes up. I am constantly on my guard against false hope. As a Cubs fan, I’ve developed a kind of self-protective hope allergy, especially after 1984 and 2003. But in this case, I let my hopes get the better of me. I let myself get carried away. I chose wisely.

So now are we engaged. We are, most assuredly, carried away. Where shall we go? I look forward to the adventure of finding out.