I have not answered a stranger in six years and it has served me well

I have not answered a message from a stranger in six years. Everybody I have been involved with came through somebody who knew us both and was willing to say something plain about him when I asked. In a city this size that is the only filter I have found that does any real work.

Forty seven, the Bronx, I teach at a community college, twenty years of leading. I am posting here against my own habit because the people I know have run out of people they know, which happens to everybody eventually and is happening to me now.

So if you write, tell me who could speak for you. Not a reference in the formal sense. A person who has seen you behave badly and could describe what you did afterwards. I would rather hear that than anything you could tell me about yourself.

What I want is long, domestic and fairly strict. I am not interested in intensity for its own sake. I am interested in a man who does the thing he said he would do on a day when absolutely nobody would have noticed if he had not.

Not looking for a man who has burned every bridge behind him and has nobody at all who would vouch, which is a practical observation rather than a moral one. Not looking for anything conducted at speed. Not looking for anyone who reads this as a challenge to be got around.