When I touched down at Dulles airport a week after graduating college, spring was throbbing in Virginia. The elms and sugar maples sang with crickets and cicadas. A red minivan pulled up to the arrivals curb. The driver wore a mustache, khakis and a blue and white striped button down. He smiled, hopped out and approached with his hand extended. Mr. Robson.

The Robsons lived in a brick house with a white wooden porch at the end of a cul-de-sac in McClean, on the edge of the Beltway. I parked my suitcase in the corner of the small bedroom and looked out the window where a small stream ran behind the strip of birch trees that circled the backyard, a small idyl that could have staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

—

Say what you will about evangelical America–and I’ll say plenty–but it is full of people looking for ways to help. Someone in my college church knew the Robsons, and they had volunteered to lend me a room while I got settled in the area if I could cover expenses.

In the seventeen years I lived with my own family, I cannot remember a single overnight guest. I can count the dinner guests on one hand. But for last two years of high school, when my skin began to crawl at home, I spent scores of nights with the families of my basketball teammates. During college I spent most holidays with the families of friends. At least three sets of parents had dubbed me an “honorary son.” Now I was hosted by people whose children I never even met.

If no lunch is free, dinners and overnight stays felt more expensive still. I stored up each generous deed as a debt in the ledger of my mind–a lengthening list of my life on the dole. I returned this stream of generosity by washing everyone’s dishes after dinner, sweeping their driveway, walking their dogs. No one asked me to do these things, but they endeared me. My hosts invariably told me I was “the most considerate young man.” But beneath my craving for this flavor of praise and acceptance that I knew how to get, something inside of me chafed against what felt like accumulating debts.

Perhaps this tension was the reason I had studied economics and international development. How much, exactly, was all this aid worth? I remember learning the concept of marginal cost–the cost of each additional unit–and feeling relief that those meals and beds cost less at the margin.

I was fascinated by the creation, fluctuation and disparity of wealth. I was well aware that in many parts of the developing world, my family would have been considered well-off. But in our community, we existed at the bottom of the food chain. When my parents dreamed of better, they joined a multi-level marketing scheme: magnetic mattresses, weight loss supplements, cleaning products… Decades later I read a book called Caste and saw my own life in every page in a way that no income chart or inequality coefficient seemed to explain.

—

In the evening Mrs. Robson served spaghetti bolognese with the butteriest garlic bread I’d ever eaten. Before I climed into bed I moved it close to the window, then gazed up at the full moon. “I am really here, on the other side of the country, on the doorstep of the city where the powerful decide, and I am going to work there tomorrow.”

This was the place where I would figure out how the world worked from the inside. After a childhood spent on the outskirts, I was going to run with the fast horses.