My father stood in my kitchen asking to borrow $1,000, his rough, weathered hands shaking with embarrassment. Before he could even explain why he needed it, my wife looked across the room and said flatly, « Tell him to get another job. We’re not a bank. » I gave Dad the money anyway. Three days later, the hospital called.My father is Wendell Marsh.

He carried timber until those shoulders went. He poured concrete in February with his knuckles cracked open and bleeding into the gloves. He was up on roofs in July at an age when every other man on that site had stopped going up, because the money was better up there and because he had never once said no to it.

And whenever I needed anything at all growing up, that man produced it inside about four days.

Not with a speech. Not with a conversation about what things cost, which is a conversation I have had about four hundred times since with people who had more money than he did.

It simply appeared, on a Thursday, and was never mentioned again.

A coat. A trip. Four hundred dollars for something at school that I have completely forgotten and that he almost certainly has not.

When I went to college, he sold his motorbike.

He had had that bike eleven years.

It was the only object in that house that was not, in some way, for somebody else. He cleaned it on Sundays. He had four photographs of it.