My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

He had thousands of photographs. He kept them in shoeboxes by month.

And out of all of them he had pulled three hundred and forty-one and put them in his own lunchbox, along with every dollar he had left in a savings account — eighteen thousand four hundred — and set it in the middle of my lawn at some time after two in the morning, using a walker, which took him, by his own account, more than an hour.

The fifty other lunchboxes were the street.

That part is simple and I'll get it out of the way. Rhonda's post went around the neighborhood group. A woman two blocks over had the idea. She put it up on Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning fifty households had put a lunchbox on our lawn, most of them with a few dollars in it and a note. Some of the notes were from kids. One said, in enormous pencil letters, THANKS FOR BEING NICE TO BIRDIE FROM DANIEL AGE 6.