You should know who you’re listening to. So let me tell you plainly.
My father polished brooches and cufflinks in a jewelry factory in Cranston for twenty-six years. He died at his workbench in 1973. I was eighteen.
There was no insurance worth mentioning. There was no plan.
So at nineteen, I took a job as a typist at Uppam Mutual Insurance. Typing other people’s policies all day long.
At night, I took math classes. One at a time. Because one at a time was all I could afford.
It took me seven years to finish a degree that takes most people four. I graduated at twenty-six. Then I started the actuarial exams. The kind of tests that make grown men cry in parking lots.
I passed the last one in 1987.
If you’ve never met an actuary, here’s the short version. We calculate how likely things are to go wrong. And what it’ll cost when they do.
People find us boring at parties. That suits us fine.
I retired in 2019. As chief actuary. Of the same company that once hired me to type.
I married a high school shop teacher named Nile Tumi in 1984. Our son Cullen came along in February of 1993. I was thirty-seven.
Now here’s the part I’m less proud of. I’d rather you hear it from me.
I grew up poor. So I learned to show love by providing. Tuition. Cars. A cushion under every fall.
And every Fourth of July, sitting on that beach house porch, I’d look at my boy and say, “Someday, this will all be yours.”
I taught my son that sentence.
I never taught him the second half.
The second half is that someday is the giver’s word.
Not the receiver’s.
The house sits at 14 Wicket Point Road in Quanet. On a little thumb of land that pokes out into the sound, about fifty minutes south of Cranston.
The old summer families have been there since the 1920s. We were not one of them.
In August of 1991, Hurricane Bob tore the porch clean off that little gray cottage and pushed half the lawn into the water. It sat empty for five years. Plywood on the windows. A sign nobody answered.
On the fifteenth of June, 1996, Nile and I bought it for eighty-six thousand dollars. Every penny we had. And some we didn’t.
For six summers, we rebuilt it ourselves. On weekends.
Nile did the framing and the porch. I did the math, the permits, and the painting.
Cullen was three when we started. His job was handing his father nails. One at a time. Very seriously.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.