The following story was reported by Bruce Cozewith.
I’m in a group of 18 retired guys that try to play golf together on Wednesdays and Fridays from May through October at a club in New Jersey. We exchange e-mails on weekends to see who will be able to make it. Then we reserve tee times for the upcoming week, which is usually for about a dozen of us, or 3 foursomes.
We play in the morning and follow with lunch. Because the club restaurant is crowded mid-day and we are generally a large group, we place our lunch orders in advance with the expected time that we will come off the course. The restaurant sets a table and places each of our orders on the table in no particular order. When the foursomes come off the course, we find our lunch and sit down at that spot.
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Several of the guys in the group are snowbirds, spending their winters in Florida. One of them met another snowbird, named Jay, and suggested we bring him into our group for the next season. We did and he fit in well.
Jay ended up in the same foursome with me for three or four of the 50 or so rounds we played during the spring and summer. It was one of the last rounds in the season when Jay and I were matched in the first of the foursomes.
After we finished our round, Jay and I were the first ones to the long lunch table for our group. Our lunches just happened to be placed across from one another. We sat down and Jay asked about my connection with Jersey City, which he had heard about from one of the other guys in the group at some point over the summer. We both were born in Margaret Hague hospital. I told him that I worked in Jersey City. We started a back and forth with “do you know so and so?”
As we started lunch, I mentioned a friend of mine, Kenny.
Jay asked, “How do you know him?”
I replied, “I was friendly with him as a kid spending summers in Belmar,” and added, “his family stayed in Max Granof’s rooming house as did the family of my now brother in law.”
Jay said, “My family also lived in that house during the summer.”
Turns out my friend Kenny lived next door to Jay.
We finally figured out that we played together as kids for five or six years over fifty years ago, but never knew one another’s last name.
Note – As Bruce conveyed this story to me, I remembered a play I saw years ago, The Bald Soprano, written by Eugene Ionesco, which premiered in France in 1950. It was characterized as ‘theater of the absurd’ with a plot, like Bruce and Jay, that centers around two strangers discovering their close connection in an evolving conversation.