For those of you Princess Bride fans, none of Enrique’s acquaintances killed my father and they do not need to “prepare to die…” If you haven’t watched the movie, I’m sorry you’ve not only missed out on classic cinema but also endured an introduction to this blog which makes no sense.

Enrique, or “Henry,” as we called him from the moment he walked through our door, entered our life when I was a junior at Montesano High School circa 1982. Our family signed up to host a foreign exchange student for the year, specifying Spanish as our language preference (I took Spanish in high school) and male for gender (there was no world in which my parents were going to allow a female high-schooler to live across the hall from my bedroom.) Enrique hailed from Bilbao in northern Spain but never failed to remind us he was a Basque, not a Spaniard.

What a special year. Enrique joined the football team as a kicker (surprise!) and had no problem fitting in at our high school. We developed a close friendship that included climbing out our bedroom window to attend “keggers” on abandoned logging roads, and lamenting about how hard my father could be to get along with (Enrique gave my dad a 1979 translation of The Nietzsche Reader for Christmas.)

At the end of the spring semester, Enrique returned home and I turned my focus toward my senior year. We missed each other. Although we weren’t much in the way of letter writers, we continued to trade correspondence through my sophomore year of college, before losing touch.

Fast forward twenty years and I’m commanding a C-130 squadron in Arkansas and flying a drug interdiction support mission to eastern Columbia (yes, the same mission I wrote about here where I “bent” our airplane.) We’ve got an overnight in Panama City, Panama and are pretty pumped about our hotel after months of living in tents in Pakistan and Oman. We walk into the hotel lobby wearing “sanitized” flight suits (all patches and identification removed) so no one will suspect we are Americans on our way to Columbia.

Yeah, right.

I’m checking in at the desk and hear a voice behind me.

“Camerón?” The accent is on the last syllable, but I recognize someone is trying to say my name, rather than the Spanish word for “shrimp.” I turn, and Enrique smiles at me.

“Enrique!” I give him a hug, and we step back and look at each other.

His hand touches his thinning hair like he’s embarrassed about it, but then he points at my balding head and says, “I wasn’t sure it was you…”

Long story short—neither of us had ever been to Panama before. Enrique was moving from London to start a cell phone company in Panama City and was checking into the hotel until he could find long-term accommodations for his family. I met his Greek wife, Athina, and their son Ektor—Enrique was a family man!

I’ve written before about my love for coincidence—as an affirmation that the impossible is actually possible. What are the odds that the two of us would randomly cross paths in a Panamanian hotel?

Enrique and I stay in touch. Our emails are infrequent, but enough such that he can ask about our kids, and I know his son is at University and they have a daughter now.

I don’t think our reunion was chance.