George Saunders

And when I got it home, it was just full of gaps, you know.

Yeah.

And my mom was like, oh, well, that's – yeah, yeah.

That's good.

And it was so – it was like a Charlie Brown tree but four times bigger.

And so what she did was she sat up at night and she repaired it.

She literally took – she cut it –

part of it off, drilled holes, and retrofit the branches in to make this beautiful triangular-shaped tree.

Wow.

Now, on the one hand, I mean, she was trying pretty hard for me.

Maybe she should have just let me, you know.

But what I really felt from that was that she really didn't want me to have that first experience be a bad experience.

And this sort of idea that, well, things are workable.

Even mistakes are workable.

That was what I took from that.

So I wish that everybody would have experiences like that where, you know, just because it seems like so many painful or even violent experiences come from

a person's feeling that nobody could accept them or forgive them or like them.

And so I think if you had the experience even once of somebody abiding with you, I love that word, abiding with you through some difficulty, then you come to at least nominally expect that from the world.

Well, I think it's accompanying with hope, you know, or with or even like, you know, I'll give you another example of what I'm talking about.

I had a high school.