Tony Ramirez approached me 15 years ago at a journalism job fair after he had taken a buyout at The New York Times.

He had a blue-chip resume: He had also worked at the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine. He asked if the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was hiring, and I offered to pass along his resume.

At the time, I couldn’t fathom why he would consider moving to St. Louis. Now, I better understand the realities of job hunting in one’s 50s.

That was the only time we ever met in person. But that single interaction led to a friendship unlike any other I’ve had.

Tony was born in Manila and came to the United States as a young child for medical treatment for polio. He ended up studying at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on political science and history, along with some Greek and Latin.

He was one of those people who had read, and seemingly understood, every important book. He was chronically online, and consumed all the news he could.

He sent me a couple of emails to follow up about a job at the Post-Dispatch. He would also email me in response to things I had tweeted, which struck me as odd. A mutual friend assured me that Tony was a strange bird, but harmless, kind and whip-smart.

We connected on Facebook, as well, keeping in touch through Tony's next couple of moves: a brief stint at the Las Vegas Review Journal, and then to Arizona to take care of his mom.

In the years when I did much of my work in the wee hours when most people were sleeping, Tony was usually awake. If I needed a quick edit on an essay, he was happy to do it. If I needed to rant about politics, he was there to commiserate. Back before our news site had a strict paywall, he would read my columns and offer edits after they had run.

He was direct -- and sometimes brusque -- in his comments. He was also witty and compassionate.

His Facebook feed was a firehose of information about politics, news and movies. He never shared stuff about his personal life with me, nor did he ask any personal questions. The closest he ever came to complimenting my writing was when I would discover he had shared one of my columns on his feed.

That he considered something I had written worthy of sharing was compliment enough.

In the olden days, I suppose we would have considered one another pen pals. But in this modern, digital age, we didn’t have to wait on letters or pen one-sided monologues. There was no small talk in our voluminous correspondence. Imagine having a brilliant and informed friend with whom you could discuss politics, art, writing, sports and more -- someone who shared your values and interests, yet never made a single demand on your time or attention. He sent a lot of messages to many friends, but I don’t think he ever expected a reply.

In an age when technology frequently divides and isolates us, it brought Tony and me together. There are limits to an online friendship, but there can also be a depth missing in casual face-to-face encounters.

In recent years, as my children got older and busier and I felt more settled in my career, Tony and I corresponded less frequently. We still occasionally commented on each other’s social media posts, and I read the mass messages he sent to a large group of people.

On Nov. 17, police found Tony dead in his home. He was 71. One of his best friends and a neighbor had called the police for a welfare check when he had been unusually quiet. Police said he likely died of a medical incident.

I found out several days later through an email from the journalism organization we both belonged to -- the same one that hosted the job fair where we'd met years ago. The group included a tribute to Tony in its weekly newsletter.

I wonder if he knew how much I valued his correspondence and friendship.

I hope he did.

When I told my son about Tony, and about his death, I said that I didn’t have another friendship quite like that one.

“You probably never will,” he said. The truth of that comment hit me.

I didn’t realize how rare it was until it was gone.

My mother never baked cookies when we were growing up. She baked sweetened ricotta dumplings, soaked in a thickened, sweet milk and garnished with slivered almonds and pistachios.

Ras malai, a creamy, milky South Asian dessert, is now widely available at Indian restaurants and in the freezer section of Indo-Pak grocers. But in the '80s and '90s, I savored it straight from my mom's kitchen.

Not only is she an extraordinary home cook, she is a master at making the homemade Pakistani desserts of her childhood: gulab jamun -- fried balls of dough in a sweet, rose-tinted syrup; jalebi -- bright orange sticky spirals of fried batter; zarda -- sweet yellow rice with saffron, raisins and nuts; kheer -- a rich rice pudding; and kulfi -- a dense, frozen sweet cream.

My father, from whom I must have inherited my sweet tooth, used to say that dinner didn’t feel complete without dessert. We were equal-opportunity sugarholics: There was always a tub (or two) of Blue Bell ice cream and a Sara Lee pound cake in our freezer.

While I embraced every American dessert I encountered, none provoked the pure ecstasy of my mom’s ras malai.

Then, one day, someone brought tres leches into our home. The airy sponge cake was drenched in three types of milk and topped with whipped cream and fruit. It had a similar mouthfeel to ras malai, but its own distinct flavor palate.

I marveled at this newfound confection.

Tres leches became an important part of our Pakistani family’s traditions. If I was visiting my family in Texas for a celebration or holiday, I knew there would be tres leches. In the years before it landed on the bougie shelves of Whole Foods, we would get it from Fiesta -- a loud, eclectic Mexican grocery store chain in Houston.

Imagine my shock when I recently discovered the Ras Malai Tres Leches at Sweet Reserve Bakery in Lombard, Illinois. It’s described as a "super-moist sponge cake infused with cardamom and soaked in saffron three milks, topped with a cardamom-based whipped cream." They also have a gulab jamun cheesecake.

This is American ingenuity at its finest.

On Instagram, I saw someone making chicken tikka mac and cheese for Thanksgiving. A friend posted on Facebook that he was eating lunch at a ramen restaurant in D.C. that was owned by Mexicans, who were playing hip-hop music.

This blending and blurring and borrowing of cultures is a big part of what makes America great. We have more international migrants than any other country. By and large, we’re happy to embrace foods, festivals and cultures that are different from our own.

I saw this recently when I attended Dia de los Muertos celebrations in San Antonio. Some were on the same day as the city’s spectacular Diwali festival. I saw women with painted skeleton faces wearing floral crowns walking among the spectators in saris cheering the bhangra dancers.

I took in these scenes in joy -- we don’t just coexist, we co-celebrate, I thought.

Of course, this is the rosy side of the American story I like to tell myself and share with others. We’re also the same country that elects leaders who say immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country. We want our diversity contained to sparkly festivals and tasty foods -- not introduced into our boardrooms or our classrooms.

We will tolerate -- even admire -- culture differences until it’s more convenient to scapegoat those who carry those cultures.

We’re in a profoundly dichotomous American moment of both rising cultural fusion and growing xenophobia. It’s not as simple as one being a reaction to the other. There’s an unwillingness to connect a thing we enjoy to the humanity of the person behind it. That’s why some may love my mom’s homemade ras malai while also calling her a terrorist raghead.

But you can never truly appreciate a food, a style, a music or a culture without valuing its people.

My mom’s desserts made an indelible impression on my childhood not just because they tasted delicious. I could tell she made them with pride and love.

The ras malai was a way to share a part of her immigrant self with her American children.

Brad M. Edwards did not know much about childbirth when his partner got pregnant in 2017.

He was excited -- and nervous -- when he learned they were expecting twins. He figured they would go to the hospital, have the babies and bring them home.

“It was a normal pregnancy -- until it wasn’t,” he said.

Her water broke prematurely. She went to the hospital. She delivered their son stillborn. A week later, she was back in the hospital.

They lost their other son, as well.

“I wasn’t prepared at all,” Edwards, now 38, said.

The loss opened his eyes to the risks of maternal and infant mortality, which affect Black women at a much higher rate than others. (Edwards and his partner are Black.) Black women in Missouri die at 2.5 times the rate as white women during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.

From 2017 to 2021, 349 women in Missouri died within a year of giving birth. Of those deaths, 4 out of 5 were deemed preventable, according to a multiyear review on maternal mortality by Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services. Black infants born in Missouri are more than twice as likely to die as white infants, according to DHSS.

When his partner got pregnant again in 2019, Edwards did his homework. He went to the doctor’s appointments and asked questions. One of his friends, Kyra Betts, is an experienced doula who had put together a symposium on childbirth and postpartum issues, so Edwards reached out to her for information and guidance.

He learned about potential risk factors, from preeclampsia to dangerous oxygen levels to placental abruption -- “so I would never be helpless in the delivery room,” he said.

The couple's daughter was born in 2020. A year later, they had a son, using a doula as part of the delivery.

A doula is trained to provide emotional and physical support and information to families during major life events, such as pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum period, miscarriage or abortion. There are many different types of doulas, including those supporting and advocating for women during birth or after birth, during bed rest for high-risk pregnancies, after an infant loss, during abortion procedures or helping to connect people in a community to health care resources.

Given how much a doula helped Edwards’ family, he started working on a way to make this training available to more Black men.

“I want men to understand: This isn’t just a woman thing,” he said. “This is about the family unit as a whole.”

He asked Betts, who is a policy doula working on maternal and infant policy for Generate Health STL, if she could design doula training specifically for men. She was initially surprised by the request. Less than 6% of certified doulas in America are men, according to employment statistics.

But as they discussed the idea, Betts realized that it made perfect sense. Her mission is improving maternal and infant outcomes: “What better space to start than right at the beginning?” she said.

She and a colleague started building a curriculum for a six-week training program that would cover fertility, pregnancy, infant care and postpartum issues.

The Dads to Doulas program began on Oct. 1. The courses, a mix of in-person and virtual sessions, are free to the public.

Similar programs are taking roots in other cities, as well. A Kansas City-based nonprofit, Fathers Assisting Mothers, offers a four-week Dad Doula Bootcamp that covers everything from conception to postpartum care for fathers to support their partners.

Betts said there are some embedded beliefs in the Black community about childbirth that her program tries to address.

One such misconception is that childbirth isn't dangerous; she relies on statistics to illustrate the risks. Another is that postpartum depression is a “new-age thing” -- people will tell her that for generations, mothers had babies and never suffered from PPD. Betts asks them to consider the things they may not have witnessed.

“They may not have had the language to call it postpartum depression, but they still experienced it,” she said.

In some cases, she hears misinformed beliefs regarding the health care system. Some people take a doctor’s word as gospel; others won’t believe anything a doctor tells them.

She believes the healthiest place to be is “somewhere in the middle” of that spectrum.

Edwards said connecting with other engaged fathers has been a life-changing experience. During the process of creating the Dads to Doulas program, he discovered that he had never dealt with the infant loss he'd experienced years ago. He was so focused on being strong for his partner and his parents that he didn’t take the time to grieve.

Working on the program has given him that opportunity to process.

“It’s been my way of healing from my loss,” Edwards said.