pre-valentine's day

Tonight I went to a "Literary Love Poem Contest" put on by Higher Achievement, which is the program that I mentor with. My two kids were ushering, not reading poems, but the theater is just a couple of blocks from my house, so I went anyway. The ten kids that did perform their poems were really fantastic, which, I hate to say it, I was not expecting. Of course, these ten had been selected from 150 who submitted poems. All of the submitted poems were published in a booklet, and some of these come closer to what I would have expected from middle schoolers being forced to write love poems (one of my favorites begins, I love my hamsters very much. / Smokey, Spotty, and Brownie / What a rush.).

After the kids finished, the president of Higher Achievement came up and spoke for a few minutes, and he told this story (as close to his words as I can remember):

When my father was 17 and a junior in high school, in Manila, he was sitting in class one day and he wrote a poem on a 5 peso bill: "When you are lost and don't know what to do... reach out. And the universe will answer." [the first part of the poem is heavily paraphrased because I can't remember the exact wording]. And then he wrote his phone number below the poem. A week later, a 16 year old girl on the other side of the city decided to call the number. They talked, and decided to meet. After finishing the phone call, the girl ran over to her best friend's house. She explained to her friend what had happened, and said that he was coming to meet her tonight. "But I couldn't have an unexpected man show up at my parents' house, so I gave him your address." That night, my father arrived at the address of the best friend, and went up to the house. The friend answered the door, and before she had a chance to explain the situation, my father looked at her and said, "I like how the universe answered." A year later, my parents got married.

Possibly one of the best "how we met" stories I've ever heard.