My brain circles itself and comes back again. Uninterruptible. I have to stop it so I take action, but it's all the wrong action because it's based on the thinking. That is turning me and swiveling about and driving me crazy.

Every few months I tear them away from their killing games and push them into the car. It is a long drive through the tunnel and across the bridge to the south part of the city. Most times, I spend half the ride yelling at them to keep their hands to themselves. When we get there, we register and the young person who is leading spends extra time with us. We are not the normal volunteer for them: We are a dad and two young boys. They give the boys special jobs and put them out front to distribute the food that I put on the tables in big piles . The line of hungry people is long, though they do not look particularly hungry. They are mostly old and Asian, humped and shuffling, pushing wire grocery hoppers on wheels. Some demand more or eye a particularly large piece of fruit. They point and speak to the boys in Chinese with harsh syllables. The boys don't know what they are saying, but they smile and try to be kind. And then all at once the gesturing man or woman will break into a smile as the boys squint at them and try to be helpful in the sun.

We started him on a wooden glider. The "skoot." He'd weave around on the playground like a darting fish in water. So when we put him on the pedal bike, his balance was already there. I just pushed once and he was off. But the best part? He laughed. He laughed as he rode for the first time. Pure laughing joy that I will never forget.

Tim Parrott lived next store. His parents never let him out to play with me. Once, under the shade of the trees that dappled the wire fence that split our property, I picked up a handful of sand from the sandbox and threw it at him. It got in his eyes and I still remember the screaming. My mother locked me in my room. Fifty years later my mother told me casually, "Yeah, those Parrott people didn't like you."

I don't know why I threw the sand. I just wanted to play.

The year my sister got cancer, I'd fly out to Chicago on Friday to visit her and come back on Sunday. The routine was simple. I'd cook a spicy taco meal for whoever was there, clean up and hit the sack. The next day, I'd get danishes and drink coffee until she got up. We'd talk and then she'd say she was sleepy. She'd lie down upstairs and I'd curl up on the couch and snooze until she was up again. I never asked for anything. Just slept when she slept. Ate when she ate. Talked when she wanted to talk. It was simple and good. Sunday, I'd go to the airport at 10 am feeling like I'd spent a year at a spa specializing in sleep therapy.

My sister says she never felt closer.

The best memory was just sitting next to him as we drove across the country from Chicago to Unionville where I was going to work for a summer on a yearling farm. The road was full of promise. Everything ahead was good and to be revealed. And he drove most of the way, the sunlight falling through the open windows as we raced through the grassy world outside.

The man kicked his briefcase across the garage. "GoddammitGoddammitGoddammit." His wife watched from the door in her bathrobe. "Bill." she said. He went into a wild gyration with his arms, a furious bird that would never take flight. I thought about cartoons and started to laugh. His face was punched with anger. In that moment I did not recognize Mr. Roland at all.

I tossed his paper at the front door. It landed neatly on the mat that said "Welcome." I walked on without looking up.

We used to gather in the twilight. "Who's captain?" "I am! I am!" "First pick!" And so it started and went until even the smallest one was chosen and we divided as the mosquitos swarmed under the street lamps and played until Howard and Mikey, the owners of the bases and balls and bats, were called into dinner.

I never asked my brothers or sister how it was for them. I just moved on with what had happened to me and thought it was mine alone. So I kept it in the dark and built myself around it and when the memory crumbled I became hollow and still, afraid I would break and be alone.

We watched them run through the tunnel toward the sunlight and the open field where the giraffes stood like alert statues listening to the wind. The boys yelled like demons on fire, waving their arms and gurgling with laughter. The giraffes blinked. They chewed. One lazily stretched its head toward the sky. The demons weaved through strollers and people staring at their phones. The demons wheeled and turned and came back to us with eyes filled by mischievous delight. I looked at her and smiled. Once, not long ago, I joked about our days here as spending six hours yelling, "WALK!"

But now we are giraffes.

I met a woman at a party. She had a slightly wolfish look — short gray hair, pale blue eyes, a sharp nose; hungry gaze. She was from Germany. She asked me about my mother. "She was a nurse," I said. Without even a moment of reflection she said, "You must have been raised with some strictness." 

After he falls, he cries. It's just a bump and he'll be fine. But then he looks up and pulls his tongue across his upper lip. "You know, Dad," he says, "My tears are surprisingly delicious."

I am in the woods when she calls to me. Her voice is full of fun and laughter and cuts through the dark growths I am lost in. Like a kid, I follow it, cutting my legs and arms and chest on the branches and brambles and thorns. It would be so much easier to stay in the dark, but her voice has such song in it and something within me yearns to it. When I finally come to the clearing, I see her in the reservoir of goodness that belongs to me but that I have hidden from myself. She laughs and splashes in the cool water. Beckoning. I am afraid to go in. Something old whispers to me: "This cannot exist." Yet I am here and fall on the shore's edge. The stones turn dark with tears. How can this be?

First there was the night I wore Bass Weejuns and read a Thomas Maguane story out of the New Yorker to your mother moments before she became you mother. And then there was the night we watched Tron until your mother said Turn it off and she became your mother. And I saw it all. The strength of her body and soul and heart. And I was never prouder to be by her side as you both fully arrived into the world, each a miracle that forever made me more than I ever imagined I could be. 

Grady and Liam I love you.

No matter what the song is, the music is changed and amplified by the nearness of the water, transformed by the laughter and cries of children that it mingles with,  polished by the implacable stares of lifeguards gazing from their wooden perches to become forever affixed to the pool in summer. It's a beautiful sun warmed mystery. 

His wife said that his mother talked about locking him in rooms when he was very little. The way she told it, his mother saw it with a nonchalant regret. "I feel bad about it now. But, Oh, well." was how he was told it went. He'd heard his mother say it himself, but it never registered. It just went by him like a thing in the dark, something he was not eager to re-awaken. 

They were loners even in first grade and that was how they wound up together on the bus taking everyone to the Dunes. They talked about what they each had in their lunches and looked out the window and tried not to be overwhelmed by the chaos of screaming, chattering voices rushing past them. She wore glasses and was thin and awkward. She was nice. Years later he remembered too her long brown hair. What he didn't remember was how the older boys found them behind a dune and pressed their heads together to make them kiss and the taste of sand in his mouth when they kicked him and the thin thread of blood that came out of her skinned knee. And how he felt sorry for her and mad and helpless to defend her. The salt of tears and the feeling of never wanting to go to a place called the Dunes ever again.

She walked toward me on 3rd Avenue and past the circling silver bands of the sculpture called "Contrapunto." (No one in the building where he worked knew the name of it. They all passed it each morning as they did hundreds of other works of art, anonymous and invisible. But I knew the meaning.) A khaki skirt, a blue shirt, a silver charm bracelet twinkling at her wrist. She smiled and I took a breath. She was pale and freckled and redheaded. She was smart and adventurous and confident and gorgeous and beautiful and funny. In the warm dusk light she came right up to me with a kiss. "Hello," she said. 

I never really looked back again.

She found the letters and pictures in a wooden box in the closet while she was looking for the water guns for the boys. She called him within the hour. I found this stuff, she said. Why are you keeping it?

He didn't have a good reason. He never did. Never would.

She had a sharp look. Angular bangs of piano black hair. A long nose. Smooth high cheek bones. It edged up to cruel without crossing, disarmed by her charming smile and laugh. The languid but careful sweep of her wrists and hands. I remember looking at her as she spoke, telling a story to the other couple we were with and that evaporated before me even as she said it: she was wearing a pink sweater with a folded down turtle neck. It clung to her long lines, accentuating her thinness, her power. A simple string of pearls circled like a ring of purity. I watched her gloss lips come to the story punchline and her long fingers touched the pearls like a period on a sentence. She tilted her head and her smile opened, a slice of white that I'd seen in the dark and yearned for in my aloneness with her. White white. Shimmering. Her eyes invited her listeners in from behind the hard line of her bangs. 

She never once looked my way and I thought, "This girl doesn't like me at all."