It's a cold Friday morning but the sun is shining and the birds are chirping

I hate hugs.

I have this running joke with Baron and Andrea that they shouldn't hug me no matter how forlorn I look because if they hug me it will only make matters worse. When Baron tires to hug me I cringe.

This makes me think of this one police detective whom I had a strong connection to.

I would see him when I went to check the logs and we would talk story and I could tell he liked me because he was always throwng sincere compliments my way, about how smart I was and more importantly how I seemed to have empathy and understanding.

One evening he called me out of the blue and asked if I'd go on a walk with him.

How weird, I thought. If he's a detective he must be old already. Like at least 30. (Turns out he was 32).

But he was local so he looked young.

Anyway, I went ahead and met him and off we walked. He was nice, and mostly talked about police things, so that I would understand things from a police officer's point of view and not just any police officer but a police officer that genuinely cared about his job.

All of this was sincere on his part I felt. I thought he was a little naive. But it disarming to have someone that wholeheartedly naive about something he really cares about.

I found out he has a girlfriend and two kids. He told me when his daughter was a baby she would let him carry her anywhere. If he put her down she cried. They were so close. He said it got so that he could hold her in one arm while he was doing the dishes. Sometimes her foot would dip into the suds-filled sink.

His son, the younger one, wasn't like that at all. But now he's five and some kind of genius. The detective told me he and his girlfriend got his latest test scores and were blown away by the brilliance. He said he looked at the test score, then at his son, and felt awed. His son likes to draw. He can look at something and then just sketch it out.

The detective also told me he and his girlfriend don't really get along. They concentrate all their energy on their children.

Some people would say he was just hitting on me.

I guess, in a way, he was.

But he wasn't. He hinted that he would like to go out with me if he didn't already have the girlfriend and the kids. He liked me but he wasn't going to do anything about it.

I suppose I felt the same way.

Whenever I think of him now, though, I imagine his baby daughter's feet in the soap suds.