The short story collection CLIFTON PARK looks back on the experiences of the narrator in the housing development of this name in the Perrysville Avenue district of the Northside, Pittsburgh, from the age of five when his family settled there to his graduation from high school. It also recounts his later experiences when he is in graduate school and meets by chance one of his former childhood playmates in New York City; a return visit from Japan, where he is teaching, to the city of his birth to find that the old neighborhood is undergoing a transformation; and a chance meeting with another former resident of Clifton Park in a gay bar in Oakland, and their subsequent move to Paris, where he has been accepted at a prestigious art school.