A few months ago, my 75-year-old technophobic father, who still works full time as a big-city mail carrier, asked me to sign him up on Facebook, leaving me nearly speechless with surprise. When he added that he was doing it to keep in touch with a 26-year-old Saudi Arabian woman he had met on his mail route, I was even more stunned.

His small step to join social media in 2015 was as giant a leap for him personally as Neil Armstrong’s step onto the moon was for the United States in 1969. In many ways, my father still lives in the 1960s. With his strict Italian-American Catholic sensibilities, he’s a man with values closer to “Father Knows Best” than “Modern Family.”

When I find my father reveling in the black-and-white mainstays of his childhood, such as Roy Rogers Westerns, I worry about him retreating into the past as well as becoming too reclusive. He has many friends but prefers watching AMC to seeing a buddy. His request to join Facebook, therefore, was the most out-of-character move he had ever made, at least in my memory.

The day he met the woman he calls Anah (a simpler version of her hard-to-pronounce name), he saw someone in a hijab who avoided eye contact. When he said “hello,” she hurried away. But day by day, she grew more comfortable with him and his gentle humor.