Serendipity

Expanding our family - and only one of us wasn’t quite ready…

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about serendipity and all of those times in my life when I was in just the right place at just the right time with just the right people for magic to happen. 

This deep dive into the wonder of serendipity began as we were celebrating my son’s marriage to a most wonderful young woman. As I looked about the room, I realized that if my husband had not been friends with Peter who was friends with a fellow from Chicago, then I never would have met him. 

My grad school roommate at the time was friends with the same Chicago fellow - and Mr. Chicago had arranged to meet up with a group in a chic DC bar. It was a classic 1980s D.C. gathering featuring a group of cocktail drinking 20 and 30 somethings, with the women trending towards the 20s and the men on the other end. I had joined my roommate because the bar was cool and I had my childhood friend, Dayna, visiting from out of town. 

As the evening rolled on, a cute man broke away from the crowd and went to the bar to order some food. His hamburger arrived, and Dayna and I sidled up to ask what he’d ordered. 

“A Lauren Bacall burger,” he said. 

To which my friend Dayna answered as only a girl from my hometown could, “Oh. Malabar Farm.”

“Malabar what?” said the normally introverted Jacques. “What are you talking about?” 

Dayna laughed and then proceeded to explain that Malabar Farm was where Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall and was just outside of our hometown in Ohio. It was the home of writer Louis Bromfield who had come to know Bogart and Bacall and had offered up his home for their nuptials in 1945. 

And now, Dayna said, she was doing a project there, and gosh, wasn’t that all interesting, and by the way, how was that hamburger?

And that, my friends, is how I met the man who became my husband nearly 43 years ago. 

Without Peter, my roommate Kathleen, and Dayna - and the now-forgotten friend from Chicago - I never would have met Jacques, Ben would never have been born, and we wouldn’t have celebrated a wedding to the lovely Nellie last week.