This is a compliment given to me, but I earned it by proxy.
A good friend of my wife was having her 60th birthday and her husband threw her a surprise party. The majority of attendees had worked for the same company as the woman and my wife and like them were now retired, resulting in a lot of talk about times past.
My wife was very highly regarded in the company, at least by the people at the party, and many of them told her how great of a manager and mentor she had been.
Then one guy - the guy who always says whatever comes to mind, you know the type - wandered over and began a chat. I was silently at her side and she introduced me as her husband. The guy gave me a look and said “You must be a genius.”
I think, hope, he meant that anyone she could tolerate for 50 years must be as bright as she was. Other interpretations come to mind, but I’m going to go with that and treasure it.
At one point I was giving a series of talks to a large energy company that had recently hired a new VP of information technology who was determined to take the company out of the mainframe era and into the new world of distributed computing and seamless enterprise-wide information sharing.
Easy words to say, but very hard to do in practice, especially against intransigent self-interested internal technological fiefdoms. There’s a lot of history behind these ideas and some good contemporary middleware tools to implement them, and this happened to be just where my interests were at the time. I had fun preparing and giving the presentations – all of them were enthusiastically put together by me, none of them canned.
Some little while later the senior marketing rep for the account called me over and without a word, showed me a note he had just received from the VP. I remember it well, though I may have muddled some of the words in the intervening years, but as near as I can remember it, it said something like “It’s been said that it takes deep knowledge and strong communication skills to be able to express complicated ideas simply. Wolfpup excels at both.”
That’s all it said, and its simplicity was its power. It must have made its way up the ranks, because the next thing I knew, my wife and I were off on a week-long all-expenses-paid award trip to Hawaii.
My son came home from hanging out with friends one evening. I asked how his evening went. We were talking when he said to me, “Anjali says you’re the most based of all the moms, and we all agree.”
Some years ago my mother was in the hospital. I arrived to visit and her pastor was also there. Mom had to have something done so she and the aides were in the bathroom and the pastor and I chatted. We had not met before this, although I was aware he had known my father also, before Dad died… Pastor said he could tell we had been father and daughter, not so much by looks but by how we talked, and by body language, how we moved. That made me feel so good, as I really missed my dad.
One of the nicest things ever said about my teaching came when I was a grad student teaching a class in Romantic poetry. Two students came up to me after class to thank me for my devout Christianity in explaining the poetry of William Blake.
These students identified themselves as God-fearing Christians, and I am a lifelong devout atheist who considers Blake to have been a religious nutbag, quite possibly delusional in his devotion, and certainly an unhealthy obsessive about theological matters in general, but I was trying to explain his thinking as best I could, with the fewest pejorative terms possible, and these students’ compliments on my sincere belief in God told me I was doing a pretty good job.
