I’ve thought about whether I would have said anything without the twenty-five thousand dollar ask. I don’t know. I might have kept going the way I’d been going — present at Sunday dinners, phone calls on birthdays, warm and somewhat guarded and not correcting the scholarship story at Thanksgiving.
Maybe eventually I would have said something anyway. Maybe a smaller ask would have produced a smaller response and the larger pattern would have continued.
But twenty-five thousand dollars is not a small ask. It is not a request you can nod at and think about and quietly not do. It is a number that requires a direct answer.
I’m glad I gave one.
Richard
I want to say more about my father, because I’ve been accurate about his role in this but I don’t think I’ve been fair about who he is.
My father is a retired high school history teacher. He taught for thirty-two years. He was, by all accounts and by the evidence of the former students I’ve met at various events over the years, a genuinely good teacher — the kind who assigned primary sources and made his students argue about them, who showed up for school plays and sports events in the name of seeing his students as whole people. He cared about his work in the way that teachers who last thirty-two years care about it.
He is also a man who made a financial decision under pressure and then did not correct the story that made it more comfortable. Those two things are true simultaneously.