A nice surprise

It is very typical for Zahava to send me an email during the week saying something like this:

"I just got a [call/email] from [name of friend or neighbor] asking if we can host a few [soldiers/seminary girls/guests] for [a meal/all the meals/the whole shabbat including sleeping accommodations].  Can I tell them OK?"

It isn't that Zahava needs my approval, mind you.  She's the family social secretary/cruise director and has a much better handle on our calendar than I do.  But she and I both have frightful memories and often neglect to tell the other one that we've invited someone for Shabbat, or that one or more of the kids will be bringing home friends.

My typical reply is "No problem... go for it."

That's pretty much how it went down this past week,  when a friend contacted Zahava to find out if we could host a couple of girls for Shabbat at our home and have them join us for lunch (the other meals were being arranged as part of an organized program in the neighborhood).  So Zahava emailed me to make sure I hadn't made other arrangements and neglected to tell her about them.

I sent back my standard affirmative reply and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward to Friday afternoon as I was getting into shorts and a T-shirt in preparation for doing sponja(basically spilling soapy water on the floor and then squeegee-ing it out the door). 

Suddenly the doorbell buzzed and the dogs (our two plus a friends dog that were were dog-sitting) lost their collective minds... barking and throwing themselves at the front door as if the chuck wagon had just arrived.

Zahava yelled out from her studio that it must be the girls we're supposed to host for Shabbat, and could I go let them in and show them to their room.  So I went to the front door, opened it and found myself face to face with a smiling married couple... clearly not the sem girls we were expecting.

It turns out that the person coordinating the group's visit to our community had done some re-arranging and these were our guests.

Personally, I was delighted.  Don't get me wrong... I don't mind having seminary girls stay with us.  But with this new turn of events, I went from being an invisible old relic that likely reminds the girls of their fathers, to having a couple of people closer to my age with whom I was much more likely to have things in common.

How much we had in common turned out to be the real surprise.

You see, this nice couple standing at our door (with three barking dogs vying for their attention) were/are both regular readers/commenters here on treppenwitz.  I'll leave it to them to 'out' themselves if they like... but suffice it to say we went into what turned out to be a perfectly lovely shabbat already knowing a great deal about one another and having a host of interests in common.

I should really try to put together a list of all the bloggers/commenters who have graced Chez Treppenwitz with their presence over the years.  The list of online connections that have become real life friendships is a long one that is still being written.

I wonder who'll be next?