You know how you feel when you receive an unexpected, sincere and from-the-heart compliment? And how the memory of it trickles down from your brain to create a warm place in your stomach any time you recall it? I received the first compliment of my life when I was eleven, and it was one of those.

“Judy! Did you really make this coffee?” My youngest aunt’s raucous voice rang from the living room. All the aunts and uncles were gathered with my mother and stepfather after New Year’s dinner, while I tackled the piles of dishes. I was at the pots and pans when she finished hollering at me. “It’s the best coffee I’ve ever tasted!”

I was stopped in my tracks for a moment. Moisture gathered behind my eyes as warmth surged down from my ears to make my toes tingle. Some miracle of genetic makeup imprinted the moment forever in my brain, to be called upon when needed. And it would be.

And then I was twelve. Mom’s cousin Libby was visiting, and I was again at the kitchen sink, barefoot in cutoff jeans in a losing battle with South Dakota’s oppressive summer heat. “Those are some good-lookin’ legs, Judy,” our visitor threw her voice in my direction.

“Now! Don’t be telling her stuff like that,” my beautiful little mama scolded, cutting the warm feeling off at the pass and dissolving any genetic makeup preparing to get to work. I remembered, of course. Especially at age thirty-five, when I discovered that I did, indeed, have gorgeous legs. But, for all the years in between, it was Aunt Helen’s coffee memory that succored me in the dark times.

There must have been other compliments – men on the make telling how beautiful and talented you were, or women admiring your dress or your shoes. But I remembered none, until I was sober in a program for a couple of years.

At age 35 I found myself in a relationship with a fellow who was not a father-figure for the first time in my much-wedded life. We operated about like teenagers, and fought all the time. In a screaming match I shouted something like “You say you love me and still you don’t like most everything I do or say. How can you love someone like that?”

He grew silent and was dead serious as he gazed at me with faraway eyes. “I love your innocent soul,” he announced without fanfare.

Fast-forward fifty years, years of learning to become a person among persons, of reaching out to the less fortunate, of finding a Creator in which to deposit my new faith. Aunt Helen’s coffee, now a distant and beloved memory, had not been needed for most of those years. In the dark times of illness or death, the new faith had held fast.

At 86 I began to believe that a man of my acquaintance was silently avoiding me. He stopped attending meetings where I was known to be, and I felt he turned away the few times we were thrown together elsewhere. I marshalled my courage on one of those occasions and spoke to him as he was outside having a smoke. “Have I offended you in some manner I’m completely unaware of?” He shook his head “no.”

I went on. “Sometimes I engage my mouth before I put my brain in gear, and I would surely like to make it right if I have hurt you in any manner.”

He stubbed his cigarette carefully and turned to face me. “I don’t believe you could deliberately hurt anyone, ever.”

How many compliments do we need in a lifetime? I thought these three were the whole complement of my life, until I got an email this week from a man I worked for 35 years ago. He was asking me to add a quote to a transcription work I was doing for him today.

Christian Love is: The sustained will toward another’s good. C. S. Lewis

“That is a good description of you,” his email concluded.

So, it’s now a complement of four. I’m 88. I can handle that.