He stopped, and he pulled off his own heavy winter coat and wrapped it around my trembling shoulders, and he stayed on the phone with the dispatcher, and he stayed with me, a stranger, in the cold, until help came.

I have thought about Don Ernesto many times in the years since.

My own family had left me to die.

A man who had never met me gave me his coat.

There is an entire moral universe contained in that contrast, and I have tried to live, ever since, on the side of it that Don Ernesto occupied.

I have thought, too, about what it means that the person who saved my life was a stranger, and that the people who took it, or tried to, were my own mother and father, because it inverts the deepest assumption most of us carry about the world, the assumption that family is where safety lives and strangers are where danger lurks.

We teach children to fear strangers and to run to their parents.