Funny how things work out

[Alan H]

There's a reason for this post, but I'll l eave it between myself and the folks for whom I wrote it. Nonetheless, I thought it was worth repeating, just because, well.....because.

I remember once a long, long, long time ago, when I was approaching 20 years old but not there yet, when I was bonkers for a girl named Debbie. While we were friends, my "attentions" weren't returned. At one point it got pretty bad, I got kind of depressed and couldn't sleep. The third night, after tossing for a few hours I prayed to God to lift this depression from me for just a few hours so that I could sleep.

And incredibly, God did exactly that. And I slept. It was a turning point in my relationship with my creator. Now I suppose that some skeptics might tell me that I convinced myself that God was doing this, or whatever, and I'm not insisting that anybody BELIEVE this. I'm not proselytizing about religion, I'm just telling you what happened from my perspective, and it's actually peripheral to the main point of the story. Let's move on.

Funny thing is, that girl grew up and moved away and married a nice guy and I married the Luminous Joan and lo and behold about fifteen years ago I was playing in my symphony and we were doing a piece with a local chorus, and hey....that's Debbie in the Alto section and that's Hugh in the Basses. We've gotten together a few times over the years, they had one of our mama cats kittens for years, and in fact now she works at Stanford, just a ten minute walk from my office. We have coffee now and then. She's still beautiful, all these years later, and we're friends just like we were back in 1974 and 1975.

You just kind of never know.