And she took the card carefully into her small hand, holding it at the edges the way you hold something old and important.

“Thank you,” she said.

Patricia’s eyes filled.

“Don’t ever change,” she told my daughter.

“And don’t ever let anyone make you feel quiet.”

That last sentence stayed with me, and it has stayed with me since. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel quiet. It was, I thought, exactly the wrong lesson to have needed the right person to teach — that a woman who had spent twenty minutes trying to make my daughter feel small was the one who understood, finally and completely, what a gift it was that she had failed.