I’m in my dad’s Top eight on MySpace, but it’s kind of meaningless because so are his new girlfriend, and Cousin Ira, and Jacques Cousteau. And besides that, Cousin Ira is dead. But everyone’s really into the thing where anything can be a family now. Mom, dad, kid. Kid, kid, kid, kid, uncle. Uncle, aunt, family friend, kid. Dad, dad, mom, kid, dad. Sister, brother, cousin, dog. Husband, wife, kid, no kid, whatever. And I’m fine with that, actually. But what I don’t get is why all those men were living next door with that dog named Smuckers. And why they were such different ages, and how could that house be a home, I wondered. And I wondered about this a lot.

In this city, houses—not apartment buildings, but houses—are pressed up right against each other. Not even touching but pressed, so that your wall is their wall. And if the neighbors you have on either side of you decided to knock down their houses, yours would go down along with them. And you’d realize you’d never had a house to begin with. You just had some people living in houses on either side of you with a roof stuck up between them. That’s why we have to trust each other a little even though we live in an urban setting. That’s why we’re afraid a little, but a little bit not afraid too. Because they could knock down their houses if they wanted. But we could knock down our house too.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. What I wanted to talk about here was the time my dad paid 15 dollars so I could fight a bear in the Carousel Mall.

I have a letter-writing correspondence going on with the dog next door. It began because I’ve always slept in the massage chair in the parlor. When you’re small like me, a massage chair is a fine place to sleep. It’s cozy and upsetting at the same time. Like you’re on a ship but the ship is constantly trying to annoy you or remind you of something you forgot before going to bed. Like unplugging the toaster even though sailors don’t like toast. When you sleep in the parlor it’s like you could at any time be awakened to a party, a guest, someone wanting to hang up their coat somewhere. Your private place where you snuggle up for the night is really a room meant for socializing. For servants to enter and offer you something if this was a time or a place when people had servants. Dazzling things have happened there maybe. Someone could end up kissing someone else under the mistletoe right around where you put your bed, and that might be the beginning of something wonderful.

So that’s what I’m saying, is: What good would it do for any of us to knock down our own houses?

My dad slept upstairs in the Master Bedroom, which has a closet and one of those windows with a ledge you can sit on, but it’s still not like I’d consider us a proper family. And because I slept in the parlor I was constantly awakened not to parties or guests or smells of pies, but instead to a crying by the side of my head. A whimper coming from the other side of the wall. As though Smuckers The Dog sat up against the other side, singing like how dogs do when they cry, squeezing out tears that he hoped would bore a hole from 3320 right through the bricks to 3322, where I live. He never managed to actually do that, but I wrote him a letter with the hope that we could come to some kind of understanding.

His first letter back demanded that my father and I take care of the weeds in our yard. They had grown so high that they dipped down over the fence and had spread into his yard, covering the grill, the dog house, the quince tree, the lawn mower.

From his bedroom my father said, “What’s a dog know about letter writing?”

“Well, I think it’s more about the weeds,” I said.

And then he held up a picture and said, “Look at your grandmother in this photograph. You recognize those shoes? Those shoes are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Those shoes are original Ferragamo shoes! She met Mrs. Ferragamo in Italy on a cruise with your grandfather. I have the tag here too. It’s signed.”

He showed me the tag from the shoes. Signed by Signora S. Ferragamo. His eyes looked like wonder, like magic, like how your dad’s eyes would look all the time if your dad was a dinosaur hunter and he was constantly finding dinosaur bones.

“I’m gonna scan it,” he said. “I’m gonna scan it and blow it up so you can read the signature. And then I’m gonna scan the photo of Grandma wearing the shoes, and put ‘em next to each other in the same document. And then I’m gonna e-mail them to your sister as an attachment.”

“What should I tell Smuckers about the weeds?” I asked.

“Tell him your father has a back problem and that you’re only 11.”

“But I’m not 11, dad.”

“You look 11.”

“I didn’t even look 11 when I was 11!”

“What’s the difference?” he asked. “Listen. I’ll tell you something. When you get to be older—like an adult, I mean, every person who isn’t your age—you can’t tell no way how old they are. It’s just true. No Way. Kids make such a big deal about age but only because that’s how we sort you out in school to keep things simple for ourselves. Nobody much cares. What difference does it make?”

I wrote back to Smuckers telling about how things are on our side of the bricks, the fence. How the weeds grow so high because we don’t really think about the difference between weeds and other things. We don’t care. We burn easy. We like shade. To us it’s a plant. And plants are mysterious. Even when you know one’s name, and even when you can predict the way a plant will behave, still, a tremendous mystery exists. Think about a human and a chimpanzee. And then try to think about a plant. A weed can trick you into thinking that the soil’s real good when they grow so high. But tall weeds don’t mean good soil. Tall weeds just mean a lazy person lives here. Or a person with back problems. Or a person with allergies who burns easy.