Personal horn-tooting session, if I may:

Today, I renewed a stranger's faith in men.

It went down like this. -ahem- As my wife and her friend attended a casual business meeting at Priscilla's in Toluca Lake, I was left in charge of said friend's 11-week-old infant. As Heidi and friend went up to the counter to get chai teas and a double espresso for me (thank you, Ted Beam), I watched the baby. She was awake and looking at me quizzically. I asked her if she wanted to play and she smiled at me so I unhooked a toy from her stroller and had him walk around on her blanket with his dangly feet and crinkly mane. She liked him. She'd smile and clasp her hands and watch him as he made his way around the stroller, sometimes stopping to sniff her feet, sometimes crinkling his mane, sometimes lying down amongst the folds of the plush, pink lamby blanket. We had fun.
Eventually, the girls returned with their drinks and asked how the baby and I were doing.

"Swell," I said, and we kept playing.

Once the girls sat down, a lady from the neighboring table stood up and leaned over to talk to them. She said, in a loud voice, that she'd been watching me with the baby and that I'd renewed her faith in men. I think she said "commend" somewhere in there as well, and she said she thought the girls ought to know that she was impressed.
I got sheepish and woulda kicked a stray rock or an empty can if it'd been in sight with a "'tweren't nothin'" muttered under my breath.

toot toot