My father was born in a shanty outside Kingston and died in a city that put his name on a building.

The arc isn't unusual for the immigrant generation. The unusual thing is what he did with it. He didn't accumulate. He distributed. He spent the back half of his life turning strangers into friends and friends into family, and when he died, hundreds of people called my mother and said the same sentence — Ossie was my best friend. The math is harder than it looks. Hundreds of people, one best friend each. He had been doing the work in parallel for forty years.

He taught me, more by example than instruction, that the highest-yield asset any of us has is our attention. He paid it generously. To the doorman who held the elevator. To the choir director he had not seen in eight years. To his sons' friends, whose names he learned and remembered and used at the breakfast table without being prompted. The attention was not strategic. It was a discipline he had built over decades, and by the end it didn't require effort.

I keep finding myself in rooms where I am the only person who notices someone. The noticing was his. I inherited it without realizing it had a name.

He had a phrase he used when somebody offered him a compliment about his career. He would say: "I have been very lucky." He meant it as theology. I came around to it as math. He had spent his life in motion, accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about people, and selected an environment where both compounded. The luckiest people I have known were not the most fortunate. They were the most attentive.

Ossie was the luckiest man I knew. He had earned the luck the only way it can be earned. He had paid attention.