Somebody offers me a hand with a sheet of ply and I hear myself say no before I have thought about it, and I have been doing it for nineteen years, and I used to think it was independence and I now know exactly what it is.

It is a vow I made in a truck in a car park in November 2006 and never once re-examined, and it cost my son two years at a community college and a tyre place.

Against which:

He is twenty.

He is in his second year.

He comes up most weekends and he sweeps a floor properly.

There is a brass plate in a high school woodshop with my grandfather’s name on it.

A judge in Denver wrote four sentences on the seventh of November 2025 that I have on the wall above my desk.