Something has made you uncomfortable and before you can recognize what room you are in, another shots shakes your hair and you know exactly where you are. In bed on dry ground, not mid-level on some ocean steamer that’s encountered high waves. To the glow from the night light, you turn and she is almost perpendicular to you, all 35 pounds and three-feet something.

Baby faced but all girl, her sun-bleached hair long and white from early summer lays on her cheeks, and she looks as much like a teenage girl as she sometimes feels. Caroline is the most consistently defiant among the children, but in her thin nightgown caught mid-dream, she’s lost. You turn on your back, move her gently – your whole hand fits around her body – and you try to talk in your awake voice, one that won’t frighten her.

“Caroline … It’s okay. Daddy’s here.”

The words don’t seem to matter. As long as she has heard them, she shuts her body down. She’s peaceful and rather jostle her too much, you only go for a subtle realignment. Lifting her legs first, then her hips and upper-body, she is in the center of the bed, enoigh for you to feel as though you won’t fall off.

This pattern repeats at least twice in the night (last night, at 2 and at 4). Once, in between, she talks plainly to you, like she’s been awake most the night.

“Tickle my arm.” Then after a few minutes, “‘Keep going.”

You wake at 6 and your lower back is tightened up and one side is dulled from having only enough bed to sleep on it all night. So you get up, pour yourself some Raisin Bran and eat alone at the table reading the sports page and trying not to let the milk dots that spill over dampen the news print. On a full stomach an hour later, you find her in the same place. The shades are drawn and with the overcast sky, the room is only slightly brighter. Her body senese this is the perfect morning for sleep. You lie down with her, put your arm over her and wait for her feet to move.

He’d painted it on a Saturday morning in a half-lit garage, where he did all his building and fixing, that smelled like 100 year-old limestone sweat and oily work tools. He had sturdy hands, his fingers calloused and often bandaged. Sometimes there were open sours smeared with some red first aid goop that his grandsons thought particular to old wisened men from another generation. They’d watch him in the narrow tool shed next to the garage sharpen lawn mower blades standing in shooting orange sparks, his face not changing. The boys, if they were older by another five years, might have seen him as the composite of the concentration and the lostness of old age, but instead saw him as still. His work was done in quiet, repaid with a handshake from a neighbor happy to mow again or a smile from a little boy grateful to have a bicycle tire patched, and when he was done, he was usually hungry.

Retired some 20 years, he took up work where he could find it – in the garage and his garden in the back or the apple tree that shaded it partly from a day’s summer heat. His gardening amounted to little more than fresher tomatoes for the people around him or under-done watermelons. For him, there were no better meals – nothing really, except the work.

There wasn’t the glory from the major repairs he’d done on the belts and the rotors of the assembly line at Colgate. Retirees from the company got a turkey on Thanksgiving and a ham on Christmas ham, for free, and it was the most important part to his year, every year, aside from complaining about the city’s professional baseball, including the big-salaried players he could immitate and always despised. About Easter, he’d tell the boys he’d be buying the ham himself.

They cared not as much about the food as he did, but it was different than shop talk, which they didn’t understand. Their parents were divorced when the youngest was in elementary school and the older boy in junior high, and there was no tool box in the house. They’d been left behind by their father – their grandfather’s son – and raised in a house where their provocative mother hammered nails with high heeled shoes and hired out anything that couldn’t be touched up with a screwdriver – or it was left broken until the grandfather found it not working. Their mother never wanted to impose on him.

He’d remade their front porch stoop, repaired a CD player – a decive he’d never seen and did not understand, but still made it sing and wail. He was a craftsmen above all and his biggest fix it job was showing the boys and their mother that there was something respectable in the family name, even if his own son had let him down.

On the slope, a dirt path has been stamped into the grass leading down to narrow walkway along the water. The geese families lie on the shore by the houses, and when they see families come down the hill by the playground equipment and the tennis court, they know there is a good chance the neighborhood ordinances might be broken. The families – against the rules – often bring long plastic bags with food. Cooly, with measured tempers, the geese waddle down to water and set afloat for the other side and another feeding.

We were the rule violators on Sunday: me, my three children and their grandmother. That morning we’d discovered the walk next to the lake and we’d disappointed the geese, who, from habit, swam closer though no one had brought any feed for them.

In May, the sun catches in my kids’ honey-blonde hair, so the geese almost assuredly figured these fair-haired creatures had brought some food. And they were right. So again the geese waddled into the water and this time swam to the kids’s hands and took the bread away.

Caroline was amazed by it – it was magical to her. “They like us,” she said. “They’re taking it … they’re taking the food!”

Annie said: “I can feel how hard their bills are.”

“I need more bread,” Charlie said. He couldn’t throw it fast enough. He’d tossed bread bits into the water before the geese were close enough to take them. Watching them scoop the floating pieces wasn’t as exciting as watching them snatch them from his hand.

These kids are still so little that it is fascinating how independent, they want to be, even in feeding the geese. When they were a year and some months old, before they could speak, I remember how I excited I was to hear them talk. This happened to me with all three kids about a month or so before they actually spoke. I’d start wondering what their first words would be, but my mind would work itself ahead a few months or as far as year. What would they be like? How would their personalities be different or would they?

I could see them trying to work the words out, their eyes big and taking the world in on rubbery necks.

Yesterday afternoon, here they were – not just as individuals, but as a group and the dynamic between them growing. Annie, concerned about the goose in the back of the pack who hadn’t been fed. Charlie racing to feed them before anyone else. And Caroline, excited that it all was happening in the first place and making sure they all had a turn to throw bread.

I can’t say which one I associate myself with most. They are all equal parts me and equal parts their mother. I love them as they are and our parts work together in them, succinctly, without any hitches.

We fed the geese bread until the plastic wrapped was empty. When it was time to go, I promised to bring the kids back as parents do when and where a good time has finished. I meant that promise. They’ll be back in two weeks to visit me and we’ll come back to this backwards spot, where the backs to the houses are the fronts, and we’ll palm the bread so the neighbors can’t see.

I carried Charlie on my shoulders on the walk back to the house and then switched to Caroline. We stopped to watch Annie twirl helicopters that had fallen off of trees fan the air and spin to a stop on the black top. And standing there, I thought about how clear their personalities are now, but like the months before they could speak, they are again in a transition period – not yet able to ask questions about their living arrangements or how they came to be. I am not so eager for those questions to come. I wish they never would. I will be able to answer their questions in a way they will understand, but that doesn’t mean I do.

When our first daughter, Annie, was only a few days old, we took her for a photo shoot at a small studio inside a department store. We brought her into the store in a baby carrier. She was swaddled tightly in a blanket, wore a knitted cap snug over her ears, and underneath those items was her full one-sie. Laid across the carrier was one last blanket. Annie’s young parents didn’t think her pink cheeks unordinary until a security guard stopped them at the door to joke that the baby was overheated.

Those people – the couple – are different now. On weekends, I am often along with the boy and the two girls, too. We are not as dependent on each other – loving people, still, with individual aspirations and goals. Our decisions are of the sort that are central to the children.

In college, long before I had my own family, I used to write about children at the apartment complex where I lived. Then I had the time to read stacks of books – philosophy and fiction, primarily, written by the age’s best thinkers and authors – and I’d read them during breaks at a part-time job in a steamy dry cleaners. Somehow I managed to come away thinking that a child’s perspective was most important to me both in viewing the world and in philosophical thought. I considered them wiser than all the professors, experts and college-educated people you come across at a decent-sized university. I respected their honesty and freedom. I loved being young and I knew exactly at 16 what I had. In my early 20s, it was the same.

And when I graduated college, I did not celebrate in the way that most young men do with their first jobs – a negligent and worthless display of expense, though it might have once seemed that way. I was temporarily living with my mom then and filled a closet with toys 10 years ahead in anticipation of my childrens’ arrival (and my wife’s), looking forward to the day my son in particular would be old enough to imagine the battles between superheroes on rooftops and sword fights among space aliens in the stars.

I listened to Charlie sleep in the backseat. We were parked for about 45 minutes outside his grandmother’s house for our overnight visit. He nodded off somewhere on the car ride here, sleep overcoming his anticipation, and as we pulled under the tall trees and the acorns shed on the asphalt popped under wheel, I decided to kill the engine and listen to his snoring and soft music while he rested up for a full night together.

His mom told me before we left that he missed his nap, so I sat and watched over him – writing what you see here – outside his Grammy’s house in the dieing light. When he woke, we would crack the boxes of toys open in the closet and turn back time to my original wishes to be a father before my own childrens’ lives ever began.

After awhile – after his nap – Charlie was alive again and we stepped on our own acorns on the long sidewalk to the front door, the two of us, excited and happy for possibilities to seem real again.

The pointed eaves of the outcropped windows, the broad walls standing on bricks as a castle would, are not in character on the street. In the shadows, the front resembled a façade propped mysteriously on a Hollywood set, behind which might only be two-by-fours and wood props at odd angles holding it in place. The ice was frozen in webs in the gravel driveway and on the winding stairs that lead to the front door, snow had crystallized in the moonlight coming to a glow in the places where it had been laid smooth and thick.

The middle boy answered the door. He was holding a dog by the neck – a black one whose immediate size was hidden on the dim front stoop. He held the dog’s powerful jaw upright. The animal was only a lab puppy, but his mouth came to a threatening point and his teeth showed the ferocity dormant for now but that would one day greet unexpected visitors.

These two figures were backlit by the same light inside I remembered when I was a boy and the house belonged to my grandparents. Light from an artificial bulb shined down on the lamp’s swollen orange pot belly crafted from blown glass colored the room the same shade as sweet tea, and it was the same lamp that I’d fallen asleep to when I was boy, when my mother would leave me on Friday nights so that she could be live a social existence. I wanted her to, even at 10. I understood. I’d fall asleep to my uncle’s late night newspaper rattling, then before I knew it, she’d carry me down those winding cement stairs, still sleeping, and lay me in the back seat.

The boy, uncertain and reluctant, pulled the door open. He recognized my mother and my brother and still hesitated. I guessed it was because he didn’t recognize the third shape – mine – moving from the top stair lip toward the door. After a late dinner nearby, we decided to visit the old house. I hadn’t seen in 15 years or more. I hadn’t been back since a short visit I made in college to help carry a new television set up to the house for my grandfather. My grandmother had passed away in a hospital bed set up in the dining room in the early 1990s. She died in the spring and it was a year later that my grandfather stood and carved the first turkey in the same space where she’d finally slipped away. Every year after, he stopped solemnly with the knife in his hands, teary eyed, and his children – the six of them and the families they’d made – looking down at their plates and pretending not to notice. The house had been inherited by an uncle and after a few years, he welcomed his brother, his brother’s new wife and small brood of children – three – from another marriage and so it became the six of them.

I was the last to enter and as I followed my brother inside, he seemed to be hunching and stepping over something in the door jam. I found my body starting to lean without reason, as his did, until I realized we were stepping over an aluminum storm door frame through the place where the missing glass would be if hadn’t been shattered. The boys were maintaining the house. Their father was asleep in a back bedroom and one boy went back to wake him. No one else was home.

The house had fallen to shambles over the years, as old houses do, but it had been accelerated somewhat by one of my uncle’s collecting habits. Behind one chair were old newspapers he’d collected and intended to read, the shelves were a mess of picture frames, knick knacks and digital clocks – at least three that I noticed. Several paintings and wall ornaments hung on the walls in the same places as they had since the 1970s or before. Against the wall in the same place since the days I was babysat there was a wooden cabinet housed my grandparents’ old records. The hallway was lined with beta and VHS videocassettes dubbed from original films. The carpet had been updated from what I remembered as a child, but it was wearing again. The furniture arrangement was the same.

Inside the door on the left, the longer of the two couches in the room was pushed under a painting. In the nearest corner, my uncle’s arm chair sat unoccupied. I remember at Christmas when the house was filled with children, they were shooed from the chair because everyone knew it belonged to my uncle. All these years later, it was still his space, his safe haven, and no one thought to sit there, not due to any fear, but because he always seemed to be there staking a claim to the corner, and though the chair was newer, it still was imprinted with his body frame.

On the farthest wall was the clock with the cuckoo I would watch for as a boy hiding under the furniture and playing under the antique dining room table. A display cabinet shaped to fit in the corner was still filled with my grandmother’s old collectibles, ceramic teapots and the like, in the same positions as they were 30 years ago, though dusted by the house’s new keeper, Connie, who was doing her best to work around my uncle’s piles and make a place for her children to be raised.

The boys were playing a game on the computer. Their father came down the hall, his hair still matted from the pillow. He had put on weight since the last time I’d seen him, four years ago. My mother had told me on the way over that he’d shed 40 pounds in the last week after a brief hospital visit. He’d had trouble breathing deeply. The doctors weighed him at almost 400. The extra weight was all water that his medications had stopped passing through.

The kids’ adopted dad has had his problems involving the city’s most sinister neighborhoods. There are stories – dark ones – that shape a man, even if the way to them are easy and evil, and in that case the boy’s father has been nearly perfectly molded. And then he found Diane, a woman he’d been with a few years and that I’d heard about, but never met. She and her boys changed him. Her husband passed away unexpectedly when the children were young, then the grandfather they were living with died and it was up to Mark, who came along having survived all these events, to be a father to the boys. The boy’s father had done every job from parking cars at an airport car rental agency to managing grocery stores, a profession somewhat related to his father – my grandfather – who owned his own grocery store and was the first to sell to African-Americans.

He has fallen somewhat short in comparison to my grandpa’s legacy. As a boy, he’d stay with my grandparents on occasion when he was down on his luck, and I idolized him. He was fun, he could relate to children and he would play with you. He had an imagination and there was part in him that would never grow up, and then it was unclear to me that it was his larger part, and that it was a serious thing to have so much in yourself not grow up. He gave me a Christmas present one year, unexpectedly, when he didn’t have to, when there were so many children in the family, and it was clearly the best toy I gotten that year, a diesel truck that transformed into a robot, a part of the reason for its grandeur was that it was unexpected.

I thought about much of this while he stood there explaining his health improvements, describing the magic socks (as he called them) that caused the inflammation in his ankles to come down, how he described how the puppy licked him in the enclosed bedroom when our cars pulled into the drive. While he talked, his wife came home with the older boy and I met her. Diane, in good spirits, his caretaker and a good mother. They were in love and after what they’d been through, individually and as a family, it was easy to see that their love was the realest kind. And the children were beautiful and playful. When they spoke, it carried something familiar that I realized later to be wisdom that only children from rough places acquire. I was taken back and I was taken forward, small children coming of age in the same backyard, under the same cigar tree I’d lie under and sing to the birds and listen to them call back. The February cold was outside, but they’d turned the living room to a den warmed by voices and hopeful children. I was proud to see a turnaround and the connection, a couple working to make life work. Another boy was in the house again – only in memory, of course – and he threw open the back door and ran outside to much warmer weather. He jumped on the picnic table and laid his back down again to see if the birds were still here. He could feel the flecking paint against his back, the warm summer sun, and he missed the days when before he’d jeopardized so many other lives.