Four lines.

Client instructs age 19.

Advised 21 or 25 more usual, staged distribution preferable, risk of dissipation.

Client declines.

And then, in quotation marks, the thing Arthur Thorne said in an office on Seventeenth Street thirty-one years ago:

“Twenty-five is a man who has been given things.

Nineteen is a man who hasn’t.”

My grandfather’s own father died in 1935, when Arthur was nineteen, and left him a one-man joinery shop on Clear Creek with a debt on the planer and four weeks of work booked.