I was living with my father in 2004, at the ripe old age of 22. He moved in with his fiancé, as well as her son and daughter, her daughter’s baby daddy and their baby. I was recovering from the loss of my surrogate mother and was in no state to live on my own, so I moved into the Brady Bunch House from hell along with the other six people.

The baby’s mother was violently unstable. She would erupt in these episodes where she would shout obscenities at everyone, (especially the baby daddy whom she verbally castrated on a regular basis), which would make a foul mouthed sailor wince and tell her to calm down.

My father had rage episodes of his own and if I had any sense of self preservation I would have gotten as far from him as I could, the moment I had the opportunity. Finally, the dog I had for ten years was nearly killed in front of me by their dog and my nose was shattered when I intervened to save his life.

The madness of the environment would have driven most sensible people to choose homelessness rather than endure such horror. Fortunately for that baby, I am not a sensible person. I would like to say that most people I know would have stayed to protect the baby from having the type of life that such an environment would create. I would like to say that people appreciated that I loved a child that wasn’t my own as if it were, giving up my own future to provide one for him.

I would like to say that the oceans are made of clean burning fuel that is also edible, creating a utopian society without hunger or pollution. None of those things are true. But I loved that baby, and until my journal was destroyed I had a thoroughly documented account of my four years raising him and the unbearable depression that followed him leaving with his mother and her douche bag boyfriend.

Trauma is a bear in that it can cause you to compartmentalize a lot of information in order to survive. When the pain is too much to live with, you forget and move on. To that end, although I remember every facet of the event I am about to relay, I can’t tell you how old the baby was when it happened. He could walk and talk, but he still wore a diaper, so I would put him at about two and a half.

It was 5:14 in the morning when there was a timid knock on my bedroom door. I locked my door because I didn’t want the baby to open it and get caught in the middle of a fight between my dog and his mother’s. My dog, being hyper alert in such a dangerous environment, treated the knock like a siren warning of an air raid during the blitz and leaped on my bed for protection. Nothing wakes you up like a 60 pound dog avalanche.

I stumbled to the door, unlocked and opened it to see my little buddy standing on wobbly legs and holding a piggy bank. He was more of a toddler than a baby at this point, but I referred to him as “the baby” until the last time I saw him, which was at the age of eight years old. Not to his face of course. I think it would warp a second grader to have a surrogate father call him a baby.

It is now 5:16 a.m. and there is a toddler at my door holding a piggy bank. Something to understand in this situation is proportionality. If I held a piggy bank it would look like I was cradling a football. In his hands it looked like a beach ball and since it was full of pennies his arms were shaking as he tried to hold it up.

Although I called him the baby, I always treated him like he was far older than he was. In this instance, I asked him about his pig and if he knew what sounds pigs made. Then I asked him if he knocked over a bank on his way to my room. He said the pennies were his and he asked me to count them. I said that I would have to declare it to the IRS and there are stiff penalties for undisclosed capital gains when it comes to pig related savings and the estate tax is where they really get you.

Although he understood maybe a fourth of the words I was saying, he held up his giant piggy bank and smiled. I’ve lost everything I have ever cared about, but one thing that can never be taken from me is the smile of a baby holding a gigantic plastic pig.

I sat down with him and took the plug out of the bottom of the pig. As anyone who has emptied a post ceramic piggy bank will know, taking the plug out is only the first step toward actually getting the money out. I shook it, I pulled a couple of pennies out hoping to break the dam and I turned it upside down and back again.

The baby was fascinated with the mechanics of this. I don’t know what the age limit is on a sense of wonder, but it was worth staying in Amityville just to see his open mouthed captivation with respect to pig based penny retrieval.

I don’t know where he got all of those pennies, but once the blockage was removed they flowed like Scrooge McDuck’s vault. All pennies too. There wasn’t a quarter to be seen, and although I spent several minutes trying to explain to him the scourge of inflation, he wouldn’t let me give him any of my change to add to his collection.

Although I can’t give a definitive timeline, I do know that this happened after the baby momma kicked the baby daddy out of the house, but before she hooked up with the man who I called the “shirtless wonder,” because although he was thirty and living in his girlfriend’s mom’s house, he refused to wear a shirt, despite the fact that it made me feel like I was living in an episode of COPS.

I wasn’t the baby’s father. The baby daddy was a good man who had been broken emotionally by the summer fling that he had knocked up. I wasn’t trying to take his role in the baby’s life. I was the baby’s protector and often his human shield, but I wasn’t his father, even though I viewed him like a son.

There was something freeing in that, as I put a pile of pennies into rows of ten on the carpet. I wasn’t his father. I was his friend. In exchange for taking the time to count pennies, I got something that money couldn’t buy. What that is can’t be described to someone that has never seen a baby’s face when they find out that numbers don’t stop at ten, but I have known nothing before or since that I would trade it for.

I got up to forty six pennies when the baby wanted to discuss Harry Potter. I can’t remember how old the baby was, but I do know he was too young for Harry freaking Potter. His mother didn’t share my protective nature, (probably because she dropped more f-bombs than I heard when I worked construction), and since at no point during the approximately five thousand hours I spent with the baby had anyone actually asked me to babysit, my input on such matters was rendered moot.

I stopped counting and we had a lengthy discussion about magic wands and “the wand store.” I think the wand store in the Harry Potter universe was Ollivander’s, a tidbit that the baby was not impressed with. I always tried to encourage learning with the baby because I think knowledge is the only balm for the wounds inflicted by a cruel and uncaring world, but he was too young for Harry Potter. He just was.

I hung out with him for a total of three hours, talking about pigs, magic wands and pennies. One of the many terrible things about that house was its location, which was an hour plus commute away from the office I worked in. Had I not had to go to work, I would have stayed and we could have watched Babe 2: Pig in the City, which I had bought for his first birthday even though he didn’t know what a movie was.

I told him that I would see him later and drove to Target, which was some ten minutes away using back roads. I found a magic kit that was meant for ages 10 and up. In it was a plastic magic wand. The rest could be discarded. I drove back to the house and put the magic kit on the kitchen counter with a sticky note that said, “Tell the baby ‘The Wand Store Opened’” and drove to work, where I got a lecture for being forty minutes late.

That night, I got home at about 7 p.m. I carried my dog on my back up the stairs, keeping him away from the gnashing teeth of the other dogs, and hurled him unceremoniously onto the bed. I spent ten minutes petting him and telling him about my day. I heard my father’s fiancé say “Go show Tyler” and there was a knock on my door.

I opened the door to see the baby wearing a top hat from the magic kit. It was an extraordinarily comedic moment because the hat was made for a ten-year-old and enveloped his head and neck. I was looking at a two and a half foot body that was top hat from the shoulders up. I took a picture with my flip phone and I had it until the destruction of all my property five or six years later.

About a month later, we were looking at the box of the magic kit and I was trying to do one of the tricks, which was inappropriately difficult for someone in his mid-twenties, let alone a ten year old. Certainly beyond the capabilities of a baby.

On the box, the G in Magic was a swirling vortex. He said it was an O and I said it was a G and spelled out M-A-G-I-C. He said “No. It’s an O, like in love. It is like how I love you.” I was so moved that I didn’t correct him. Although he is in college now, he probably still doesn’t know the difference between a G and an O, because I loved him too.

He had 185 pennies in his piggy bank. I told him about compound interest and to save it for when he had a baby of his own.