Three

Several months ago, I went to a dinner with over forty members of the Single Baby Boomers Club. We were scheduled to take part in a team putting contest on the Arnold Palmer Golf Course in The Villages. It was raining so the contest was canceled but we had dinner anyway.

As I’ve written before, there’s over a thousand people in the club. I’ve been to three dinners with the members. The first was in Biloxi, Mississippi in November. One of my friends asked me to join him on a mini junket. We flew to Biloxi. A group of the Baby Boomers took a bus and were going to be there the same time we were. I reached out to the group to find out if they planned to share a meal while they were in town. They did and they invited my friend and me to join them.

A week later I played golf with a group of Baby Boomers, and we went to dinner after.  It was a small gathering of a dozen golfers who liked to eat.

My third excursion with the group was the Arnold Palmer dinner gathering.  I was the last to arrive, so I got the last seat available.  I found out that being five minutes early was really ten minutes late. I ended up sitting with a lady that I had shared dinner with on both my trip to Biloxi and the golf/dinner outing. With hundreds of different possible combinations in such a club, I wondered what the odds were that I would sit with the same lady at three consecutive dinners.

I learned in Biloxi that she had a male friend in the club, and they were an item.  He was at the Biloxi dinner and sat with us at the Arnold Palmer dinner too.  I dismissed the idea that some supernatural phenomenon was trying to connect the two of us, but I still thought it was highly unusual.

Near the end of the Palmer dinner, the hostess of the event, Susan, gained everyone’s attention and thanked us for coming even though the weather interfered with the scheduled outdoor activity.  She hoped we enjoyed our dinner and offered a last-minute surprise.  She had three small prizes to give away and there was going to be a random draw for the three.

I knew that my sister-in-law, Kathy, was somewhere in the room with her neighbor, Darla.  I’d met Darla before, so I knew of their friendship.  The two of them had attended several Baby Boomer events throughout the fall, but this was my first large club gathering of the Boomers.

Susan reached into a golf hat that she commandeered for the drawing, pulled out a slip of paper, and read “Darla Stocks”, Kathy’s friend.  It blew my mind a bit when Darla was asked to pull a name from the hat, reached in, selected a name and read, “Bob Tebo”.  I received my prize and was asked to select the final name.  When I read “Kathy Van Bruggen”, my mind was officially blown.  The three prizes were awarded to the only three people in the room that Ruth knew.

The next time I saw Susan, I asked if the drawing was rigged.  Had she made arrangements for the three of us to win?  Did she know of our relationship? She hadn’t and she didn’t.

I’ve seen Susan on a half dozen occasions over the past several months.  Each time we meet she asks about Darla and Kathy, and we recount the story of the spiritual drawing that was held that night.  There’s no logical explanation unless you believe in spirits who drop into our lives just to let us know they’re around.

I know I do.