One thing that I can say about my dad is that he was an excellent judge of character. Far better than I was and am. It was his special gift and he was never wrong.

After I’d known Tia for about a year, she and I went over to my dad’s house to pick up some food from his garden on a sunny weekend morning. She liked his unruly free-ranging chickens as she’d never been around any and I enjoyed being out in the country again. We stayed and visited for a few hours, just walking the backwoods and hanging out. She wandered around and looked at everything that she could find or touch, which was her way.

During the visit as I was meandering along the fenceline with my dad, he nodded over to where Tia was, way across the yard and said, “Son, is she your girlfriend?”

I said, “No, dad, not my girlfriend. She’s had some very bad experiences with men and is not really interested in that right now.” I didn’t want to go into detail and violate my friend’s privacy, nor tell him that it was more complicated than that. But Tia wasn’t at the time my (or anyone’s) girlfriend.

Then he said, “Well, I can tell you she’s a good one. You should spend more time around her and away from some of your other friends. She’s something else.”

When my dad said a person was “something else,” that was high praise. The very highest. He said that about maybe three people in my life that I’d ever heard. And looking back, he was annoyingly enough always right in that one little area, whether about praise or disdain. A girlfriend of mine that he’d met earlier he’d judged to be exploitative and horrible, and he was 100% correct. She was damaged and damaging and he figured that out in about 10 minutes when it took me six months. (And no, he wasn’t talking about Tia being beautiful, though she was. My dad, much like me, didn’t care about that or really notice it much at all and never had. Anyway, most of what made her deeply and profoundly beautiful was her personality and immeasurable kindness, which no picture can convey. That was what my dad had picked up on.)

He was right, right yet again. I wish I’d told Tia what he said. She was indeed something else.