I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”

I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.

If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.

Or I found what I can’t remember.

I do remember the tree.

It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.

I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.

As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.

It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.

We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)

What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?

Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.

I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.

But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.

The building itself is Standard American Grade School with gray cement lintels over light tan bricks. Art Deco letters stating the school’s name were poured into cement, striving to make it look like the district hired a stonemason.

It’s an Art Deco starter set of a building, a school designed by someone who once heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. The windows are covered now.

There’s a relatively new but definitely crumbling playground around the back. Some plastic is melted, some chains are bent or broken. Some of the padded foam mats that replaced the mulch and gravel of my era of swingsets are missing. I don’t think children come here anymore. I later find why.

I rode this route July 30 and am typing this sentence meant for Oct. 24 late at night on Aug. 4. It’s massively hot outside and my wife is massively pregnant, lolling on the couch rewatching what, based on Clooney’s hair, is an early-season episode of “E.R.” It’s quiet, which I’m not guessing will last many more days for us.

But now I’m back in July, winding tight circles on my bike and taking mental notes about a swingset.

The homes are lovely by the school. It’s quiet but for birds and the hum of a nearby lawnmower. They’re single bungalows, classic beauties that would be sold in a second in my North Side neighborhood so they could be torn down to be replaced with lot-engulfing megamansions.

Here they sit with manicured yards.

It’s gang turf, I read later, and that makes sense. You look at cars, not houses, to determine a neighborhood’s income level. They’re old and few. It’s Jeffrey Manor GD territory, a website tells me. They beef with the Slag Valley set of the Latin Counts a few blocks to the east, and I wonder if I’m embarrassing myself by admitting I’m the type of man who has to google gang names.

I am that man though. It’s Aug. 5 now, just after 6 in the morning. My wife’s asleep, or at least still in bed. I’m watching cloudy skies roll over tree-lined North Side streets.

Chris Wormley didn’t like the gangbanging at Goldsmith School. It wasn’t Goldsmith by the time he attended the Art Deco starter set on Crandon and 102nd, but “AMIkids Infinity High School,” a Tampa-based nonprofit Chicago contracted with to run the old Goldsmith building as a high school for troubled teens after the Richard M. Daley administration shuttered Las Casas Occupational High School in 2010.

Wormley, 17, was stabbed to death in the school on March 1, 2012. A fight broke out as the students were lining up inside the doors to be waved with the metal-detecting wand. Wormley was killed and another kid was injured. The latter kid sued the district and AMIkids for negligence in 2016.

The news trail for what happened to Wormley’s killer dies after two articles — the news stops caring when the press releases don’t arrive — but I find an Illinois Department of Corrections profile of someone with the same name and, I think, face. The inmate has the same swaggery head-cock and goofy stick-out ears as the kid’s mugshot, but with a shaved head, more tattoos and about 40 extra pounds of muscle. He’ll get out in 2045, if all goes well.

I can’t find when AMIkids left the building, but it’s been up for sale since January 2017, offered alongside a slate of Rahm’s own school closures.

Across 96th Street everything changes. The manicured blocks of lovely homes instantly become a dead strip mall of battered signs and vacant storefronts. One of the sliding doors is absently open — nobody even cares. Across the street, men on ladders tinker with where the awning once was on a Dollar General.

Through an underpass, it’s homes again. But here the weeds grow longer. Here the yards are less maintained, and I hear no lawnmowers. Here there are more people walking up and down those streets — old men with four-footed canes and once-stylish hats, women hauling errand bags, a few kids riding summer bikes.

“Time to Save,” the sign over an old… bank? Church?

“Time to Save,” the sign over a dust-coated brick building at 93rd tells me as I turn onto Cottage Grove. The letters are blue, ringed in neon that will never light again.

Here it goes from run-down to straight-up musty. Empty storefronts of different designs, each decade’s stab at revitalization or urban renewal (“Urban renewal is negro removal,” James Baldwin chides from the grave) sitting vacant next to the last one.

Two men sit outside a store with resurrected Frankenstein lawnmowers. One’s wearing a wifebeater undershirt — the only other name I know for it’s the also-offensive “dago T” — and a straw fedora without a band. A cigarette dangles from his lips. He looks like a photo from the ’20s.

I ride on, faster and faster. I’m hitting a stride here, but traffic’s still busy enough I’m worried about getting creamed by a Honda. I race past bus stops and storefront churches, by little girls playing patty cake and men in dago Ts laughing and joking as they stand around cars. I race by because the road is fast and I’ve hit a good pace for cardio, trying not to think about all the stories I’m blaring by.

The laughter of children playing basketball at a summer school makes me smile. They’re about 9, 10. I slow my pace and find a graveyard, where the next story will pick up.

My mind keeps going back to the lovely homes by Goldsmith. It was peaceful and beautiful there, where the child died.

It’s a Saturday morning in April. The day’s starting slow in the windowless warehouse on a frontage road alongside the highway. Only a few of the shoppers have ambled into the store. The homeless who gather to solicit loose change haven’t yet arrived, taking a slow jaunt in because the spring feels too nice to start their shift that early. The off-duty cops in Sox caps joke as they arrive for their own shifts working the door as a side hustle.

And Jackson plays overhead in the grocery store.

I’m gonna make a change,
For once I’m my life
It’s gonna feel real good,
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right

The warehouse store’s first aisle hews closer to what I would consider a “normal” grocery store. Glass-fronted freezers of pizza, tamales and other foods to warm up and throw down the gullet. Between separating the aisle, freestanding racks of discount bread.

Passing through a small opening between two freezers takes you to a different world. Candy.

Not just any candy, loads of candy. Oodles of candy. Candy by the yard, candy by the mile. Giant sacks of off-brand gummy sharks and specially licensed Spongebob Squarepants gummy Krabby Patties. Racks of Kit-Kats and sacks of gumballs, the latter denied even a trademarked name, just “gumball” and the flavor.

There are all manner of bulk items at L&P Wholesale Candy alongside the highway in Greater Grand Crossing. Massive two-gallon jars of pickles, vats of liquid soap to be tapped for industrial workers. Gallon jugs of barbecue sauce and rows and rows of jugs of snow cone fluid.

They’re all strewn together. Jugs of bleach next to suckers. Boxes of Hugs Fruit Barrels next to $22 man-sized sacks of charcoal lumps. And only a few early-rise shoppers picking through the endless aisles of sugar bombs and industrial plungers. A few look at me. We nod.

The counter is a barricade. No outlet, no entrance, just a stainless steel expanse protecting the high school kids waiting for the customers who, in a few hours, will form a conga line of commerce up to the registers.

They have to get their change from an older woman sitting behind bulletproof glass.

I walked up with my purchases: a jug of cashews and a box of racist bubble gum, one that decided if it was going to package cookie-style fortunes among the sticks, the box needed to feature a yellow smiley face with Fu Manchu mustache, slanted eyes and conical Chinese farmers’ hat. When I try the gum months later, I find it of the hot pink variety where the flavor lasts seconds.

“A thrilling time is in your immediate future,” the hate crime of a smiley face tells me once I open the stick.

But I’m months away from getting that message. Now I’m just buying cashews and racist gum.

A tall, handsome black kid with neck tattoos and keloid scars jokes with the two fashionable young Hispanic girls working with him. They hang on and giggle at his every word as he flirtingly threatens to spoil the end of “Avengers: Infinity War” for them. It had come out the night before. He and some friends waited in line for it. The girls hadn’t.

“You’ll cry when you see it,” he said.

Michael Jackson had long since trickled away, leaving nothing but a scene from the South Side of Chicago, from a neighborhood where the news just talks crime and treasure troves of gum and chocolate stay, if not ignored, unsung. The kids smile warmly as we talk movies and bag cashews. I head out into the day.

Another scene from that same morning