A person who has misjudged you is a person who has handed you an advantage.

Never correct them.

Just remember that they have done it.”

He never measured anyone by a car, or a job title, or a photograph of a meal.

He had built a real company with his own two hands over forty years, and he wore the same gray wool cardigan to Sunday dinner that he had worn for a decade, and he could not have cared less what any of us drove.

He had died eight months before that Christmas, and I had grieved him the way you grieve the one person who understood you — which is to say, completely, and mostly alone, because no one else in my family seemed to feel his loss as anything more than a change in the estate paperwork.