I held a position for nineteen years that everybody in my town admired, and the position was a sentence about my own character, and the money I was refusing was never theirs to give me or to withhold.

Asking for an accounting of your own child’s trust is not taking a handout.

It is the job.

Three. A note matures. Know the date.

A renewal is not a right.

Nobody has to refinance you and nobody has to tell you in advance that they will not, and a man who has renewed twice without trouble stops seeing the date on the page.

Mine was the thirty-first of August and I had not looked at it since 2020.