They Were About to Split Up Five Kids Under Seven. The One Man Willing to Take All Five Knew Exactly What That Does to a Child

It’s the reason certain car doors closing can stop me in a parking lot thirty years later.

And when I sat in that social worker’s office and did the arithmetic — five children, three vehicles, five sets of that same sound layered over each other — something in me simply refused.

Not out of nobility.

I want to be honest about that.

It wasn’t that I was a good enough man to rescue five strangers.

It was that I could not physically stand to let that specific sound happen to another set of children when I had a workshop full of oak and seven years of savings and two working hands and nothing else in my life I loved more than I would love keeping it from happening again.

That was the afternoon I made the decision that everyone in my life would spend the next month calling reckless.