Jake saved for eleven months and three weeks.
I know the exact duration because he started the day after Christmas, when my mother gave him a book about mountain biking trails in the Pacific Northwest, and because I watched every stage of it from the specific parental vantage point of someone who is trying not to interfere with something that is going better without the interference.
He was eleven when he started saving and twelve by the time he finished.
The money came from the lawn mowing, primarily.
He had five regular clients in the neighborhood, people who had agreed to pay him fifteen dollars a cut and who had the specific loyalty of clients who appreciate reliability, which Jake had in abundance, the specific reliability of someone who shows up when he says he will and does the work in the order it needs to be done without being reminded.
He kept a record.
This was his own idea, a spiral notebook with a column for each client’s name and the dates and the amounts and a running total that he updated in pencil every Saturday night before he went to sleep.
I found out about the notebook by accident.
I was walking past his room and his door was open and he was sitting at his desk with the notebook open, tallying something, and he had the specific expression of a person who is doing arithmetic that matters.
I said: what are you working on?
He said: the bike fund.
He showed me the notebook.
I looked at the columns and the dates and the running total.
He had organized it the way I had organized things when I was working in finance, before I moved to education administration, with the specific clarity of someone who understood that the record was itself a kind of tool.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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