A man coming out of pr*son that no landlord will rent to.
A kid aging out of foster care with a trash bag of clothes and nowhere to put it down.
We find them the way Samuel found me, and we help them the way he helped me, quietly, with no strings and no name attached, so the only thing they owe is to someday do the same.
But that was the money.
The money was never really the gift.
And then I did the thing I had wanted to do since I was seventeen years old with a textbook in one hand and a bottle in the other.
I went back to school.
I finished the degree I’d abandoned in 1999, the one my parents swore I’d never use, the one I’d folded up and put away the week they folded me up and put me out.
It took two years of night classes at forty-three and forty-four, sitting in lecture halls with kids younger than my daughters, and I loved every exhausting minute of it.
