Apropos of the attention he’s getting, I share this anecdote about Jake Auchincloss.

A few years ago, I was doing a shift at the then twice-yearly swap event at Rumford when Jake rolled up with his then fiancée. In the back seat was a nice set of shelves they were donating. The shelves had a ton of pieces. It had clearly taken some time to wedge them into the car. It took us a non-trivial bit of time to unload them. We get them neatly arranged in a corner, all the parts, and a woman claims them. Not a surprise. They were nice shelves.

Just before Jake gets back into the car, the woman tells him that she has no way to get the shelves to her home. Would he mind driving her and the shelves. He looks at me. He peeks into the car and looks at his fiancée. He pauses. Then, he nods okay. And, we retrieved all the pieces from the corner where we’d neatly put them and wedged them back in the car.

I can’t recall how the woman fit, if she fit, or how she got back. But, I assume that Jake unloaded the shelves — again — at the woman’s home. Probably got convinced to assemble the shelves for her.