To understand what I was sitting in, you have to understand what that house was, because it is not incidental.

It is the whole thing.

My father was Walter Voss and he was an architect in Cleveland for forty-one years.

Not a famous one.

He did schools, a fire station, two churches, and about ninety houses, and he did them in a city that spent most of his career losing people.

He bought the house on Larchmere in 1996 for eleven thousand dollars because it was a wreck.

Brick, 1911, four bedrooms, a collapsed rear porch and a roof that had been open to the sky over the back bedroom for two winters.