Sitting in the restaurant, the man, who just turned seventy, saw a former NFL great on T.V. talking about and paying tribute to his dad, who died when “The Best Hands in Football” was only seventeen.

That caught the man’s attention. The former player then said what pierced the man’s heart. The player said his dad was the greatest dad ever. The man, who waited for his nacho, shed a tear.

His dad died when he, too, was seventeen and while he, also, thought his dad had been the greatest dad ever, he never, ever said it and really never even thought to say it or ever announce such a thing because his dad committed suicide and who would ever have believed a seventeen-year-old teen about suicide?

And then for all those years in between seventeen and seventy there was silence, a loud, blaring silence that rang in his ears like a bad case of tinnitus.

Nobody spoke of his dad and his children never heard very much about the father who had held the man’s hand when they walked in the door of the man’s new fifth grade class in a new town and a new school and who promised that fifth grade school teacher that he would work with his son so he wouldn’t have to repeat a year in school and who tossed baseballs to him over and over and over until the man could hit a fastball and a curve and who sat in the bleachers in great pride as his son became a Little League All-Star and who watched as his son walked forward to be inducted into the National Honor Society.

The man had wished that his dad had been there when the man got his bachelor’s and master’s and doctorate with distinction, but in a certain sense he was there.

And so the man turned to his wife and choking back the tears and in a halting voice said, “My dad was the greatest dad who ever lived.”

And then he thought to himself, at least there are two people in the world who now know that.