“What sort of dork wears a bow tie?” she thought. It was
a big fashion “don’t” in her vocabulary, but then her conscience said to look past the tie and get to know the man’s character.
So she swallowed her pride and spoke to him for the rest of the evening.
In the course of their conversation she found out that the “dorky” bow tie was part of a little tradition his family had been practicing since the end of World War II. His great- grandfather, a musician who loved wearing bow ties, was one of the Jewish survivors from the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in Germany, and the lone survivor of his family. He migrated to America with very little money, and swore to himself that he would build a whole new clan under the family name. He succeeded, and at the time of his death had managed to build a family business. He also had five children, sixteen grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren (which eventually reached twenty-eight, including Daniel himself).
As it turned out, the night that Daryl and Jillian had gone out was his great-grandfather’s birthday anniversary. The family tradition among the men during that day was to wear bow ties similar to the ones their great-grandfather wore, in honor of the man who gave life to their family.
Daryl didn’t really wear bow ties on other days. He wasn’t a fashionable man, but he wasn’t that dorky, either. But he was a man who valued everything his great-grandfather