What are the nicest things anyone has ever said to you?
I certainly hope you have had at least a few times in your life someone told you how proud they were of you, or how special you are or some variations on that theme.
Before I get too far into this, I’m going to set a couple of rules.
Don’t count times people said they loved you. Wonderful, yes, but not that unique.
Don’t count things people said to you in the throes of passion, from as basic as “Do me” all the way up to the Big F. Don’t count people telling you how good you were. Nice to hear, but not always easy to believe.
I’m going to set one other limitation. Only include things people have said about you. People have said the most amazing things to me about my son Virgile, who might be one of the best people in the world, but those are for him, not me.
I’ve got three things to mention, and they took place in 1968, 1992 and I think 2009.
I’ve also got a bonus one from 2016.
In the fall of 1967, I started dating a girl who I thought was two years younger. I was 17 heading for 18 and she was a sophomore in high school. I thought she was 15 nearly 16, but she had skipped a grade and had a September birthday, so when we started going out, she had just turned 14.
We dated five times from Thanksgiving 1967 to the middle of February 1968 — one nice dinner, three movies and a Peter Paul & Mary concert at Constitution Hall.
That spring, the 14-year-old object of my affection who I thought was 16 sent me a note telling me she couldn’t go out with me anymore. It may have been the first time I suffered a broken heart, but one line in it was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me.
“You have done more things to make me happy than any boy I have ever known.”
It would be nearly 25 years before I heard something that could equal or top that.
It was the late summer of 1992, and I had started dating someone I liked, someone who I thought had the potential for a real relationship. She worried that we were moving too far too fast, so we decided to take a one-month break, see other people and decide if we wanted to move forward.
One of the other women I met during that month was a French rocket scientist who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Way out of my league, although wonder of wonders, she liked me.
For some reason, I told her about my situation. We went out three Saturdays in a row and hit it off really well.
Near the end of our third date, she said something truly amazing to me.
“I know you’re going out with someone else too, and I don’t think you’re going to choose me. But I want to keep trying because I think you are worth it.”
We got married a month later and we’re starting our 30th year together. I never saw the other woman again. I think she wound up marrying some guy named Marvin, or maybe it was Melvin.
The third wonderful thing was a much shorter comment. When I married Nicole in 1992, I became a stepfather to two amazing children. Pauline was 12 and Virgile was 7, and since they only saw their biological father for six or seven weeks in the summer, I had the privilege of being the guy who was there for them every day.
Virgile called me Dad from the beginning, but as an adolescent and a girl, Pauline was more conflicted. Even though we grew into a very good relationship, for the better part of two decades she called me by my given name.
That’s why at Christmas 2009, when we visited her in Northern Virginia, and she started calling me Dad, it was as wonderful a word as I ever heard in my life.
She had always introduced me to her friends by saying I was her stepfather, but that Christmas she was telling people I was her dad.
Truly wonderful.
The bonus?
It has another Christmas, seven years later in Guatemala. I had met my third grandchild, Albanie Yvonne, the year before in Virginia when she was less than a year old. She was 2 when we visited in Guatemala and Pauline said I shouldn’t be disappointed if she was shy around me or didn’t even know who I was.
I was prepared for the worst, but when we entered the house and she saw me, her face lit up. She called out “Grandpa Mike!” and came running across the room and jumped into my arms.
She is 7 now and is growing into a great beauty.
And she makes the list of the nicest things anyone ever said to me.
