Beautiful men

There is a show on The Learning Channel called "Long Lost Family."

Ancestry.com is behind it, and the hosts help people find their birth parents. 

One woman on the show had given up her little boy for adoption when he was just a few days old. She promised him that someday she would find him.

More than 30 years later, with the help of the Ancestry researchers, she did. And he agreed to meet her.

You know what the first words out of her mouth were when she saw him? 

"You're beautiful!"

He was a nice looking man, no doubt. But she wasn't looking at his curly dark hair or bushy beard. She was looking directly into the sweet eyes that she hadn't seen since he was a newborn. Beautiful.


I saw someone I hadn't seen in probably two decades over the weekend, and although I didn't tell him he was beautiful, it crossed my mind that he looked exactly the same as I remembered.

I saw him at the memorial service for a beautiful man who passed away on Feb. 26, 2016. We were all coworkers at the same newspaper back in the day.

What made our coworker Dan beautiful? His quiet, compassionate demeanor.  I never heard him say a disparaging word against another human being. 

Perhaps when men are born it's OK to call them beautiful. And when they die.

As a group of newsmen stood around sharing memories outside the church sanctuary after the service, one piped up after examining my friend Tom's hair. "You dye your hair, don't you?"

Tom is over 50, but his thick hair is so dark that not one, but two men declared that he must dye it.

"Wait," I interjected. None of you accused me of dyeing my hair. Why not? 

These men of many (written) words didn't know exactly what to say. One finally admitted that it was pure jealousy to see that this man's hair would have looked at home on a 20-year-old's head while his own hair (what was left of it) was gray. 


Our departed journalist friend Dan, who by then was interviewing angels, probably never thought much about his hair. Especially during the months after his cancer diagnosis.

What he did think about was continuing to be the best person he could be. To him, that meant being the even-keeled editor that he always was. He worked right up until the end. How, I don't know.

The pastor who conducted the memorial service said something amazingly insightful that brought tears to many eyes.

He said he had posted information about the memorial service to his Facebook page that morning, and unfortunately had spelled Dan's last name incorrectly.

He quickly pressed the "edit" button to correct his mistake. And when he finished, the words he saw described our friend's situation to a tee.

"Done editing."

And to that, I will add these words: "Well done, beautiful man. Well done."