A couple of days before Thanksgiving when I was 11 years old, the house my family lived in was gutted by a fire. We had been stripping the white paint off the 150-year-old oak woodwork as a restoration project. It was snowing and windy out, so the workers had closed the windows. A spark from plugging in a work lamp lit the turpentine fumes, and a fireball tore through the house. Firefighters arrived in minutes and saved most of the load-bearing structure. But everything inside was melted, charred, soaked, ruined. It was a year before we could live in it again, and a few more years before you couldn't tell there had been a fire there.

To this day, I remember this on Thanksgiving -- because of what happened next. Before that day was out, neighbors had offered all of us places to sleep. The owner of a small independent department store downtown must have heard about the fire on the local evening news. He unlocked the doors of his closed store after hours and told us to go in and take whatever we needed. I remember being awed because it was a fancy store we never would have [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.