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.

Here is what I did about it, since people always want to know.

We made a rule and we said it out loud together: nobody in this house gives away what they need. You give away what you have. Those are different, and if you can't tell which is which, you come and ask me.

And I put three dollars a day into an envelope on the refrigerator with his name on it, and told him that money was his to give away to anybody he wanted, no questions, ever — but the lunch line was not a fundraising opportunity.

He has never done it again. He also, I have noticed, has never once taken from that envelope for himself.

His grandmother was at the house that Sunday.

Rosalind comes for dinner the last Sunday of the month, and that month it was the whole family, fourteen of us, the table extended with the card table on the end the way it always is.