An Arizona grandma who accidentally texted the wrong teen about Thanksgiving last year and wound up inviting him to dinner had him over again this year.
After Wanda Dench discovered her mistake last year, she still invited Jamal Hinton to join her family for Thanksgiving dinner, and he accepted.
The two kept in touch throughout the year, and Hinton showed up this year with a pumpkin pie in hand even though he had to drive 40 minutes from Tempe to Dench's home in Mesa.
“It’s important for me to stay connected with this family, because they are like my family,” Hinton told CBS News. “They are so welcoming and nice.”
Since their mix-up hit Twitter last year and was retweeted more than 30,000 times, Hinton graduated from high school, met a girl, and got a job as a butcher at a restaurant, CBS reported.
Through it all, he has talked to Dench regularly, just the way a grandma and grandson would.
“She’s not ‘kind of’ a grandma; I consider her my grandma,” Hinton told CBS.
“We’re more of [an] extended family,” Dench agreed to the Arizona Republic, “and best of all, friends.”
Hinton has even gotten some grandmotherly advice from Dench.
“The advice that she has given me is go after what you believe in,” he told CBS.
He also said she taught him by example to treat others how you want to be treated. “Because when you treat people how you’d like to be treated then they tend to treat you the same,” he said.
Twitter was again touched by the story.
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