He texted me about two weeks after the dinner to ask if he could call. He had a question, he said, that wasn’t about the situation with Paige — it was about something I’d said at dinner about the community meals program, and he wanted to understand how the hospital funding model worked because he was thinking about some charitable work through his firm.
I told him to call and we talked for an hour about the funding model, which then turned into a conversation about the volunteer logistics, which then turned into him mentioning that his firm had a community investment committee and wondering if the program might qualify for a grant. It was the most practical and ordinary conversation I had had in several weeks, and I was grateful for it.
He is a person who thinks in numbers and systems, which I also do, which means we have a natural working language. He is direct in the way that people who have been raised by direct people tend to be direct. He is genuinely kind, and I mean genuinely — not in the performed-warmth way, but in the way that comes from actually caring about the wellbeing of the people around him.
About a month after the dinner he came to Hartfield for a day — Paige was at a work conference, and he used the time to visit his parents and, by arrangement with me, to have coffee at a diner near my house. Not a significant plan. Just coffee, an hour, learning each other without the pressure of anyone else in the room.