Blogroll Me!
About seventeen or eighteen years ago, I attended an Aish HaTorah lecture that I found pretty inspiring...at the time. Not quite sure anymore what the topic of the evening was, but I know it had to do something with relationships and finding the right one for you and making it work, etc.
After the talk, I spoke to the rebbetzin who'd given the speech; she was a baalat teshuva, very well-spoken, hip and modern and someone anyone would be like to have as a friend--Lori Palatnik, if you're out there, kudos to you. I really wasn't dating a heck of a lot, and if I was going out, the people I was meeting weren't really right for me -- like a shoe that doesn't fit, although you might try to adjust it because you want to make it fit -- or I was not right for them.
Lori Palatnik told me that she was into setting people up and I should come over to her home so that she could ask me questions, get to know me a bit and decide if maybe she had someone in mind appropriate for me. We set up a date and time for me to visit her, even though I'd be leaving early the next morning for a trip to Paris, France, for a cousin's wedding. This visit with the rebbetzin/shadchan might make all the difference to my future, so I felt it important to go regardless that I still had some packing to complete.
She lived in the area of Thornhill, pretty new, and very foreign to me then, although we moved into the area about 18 months ago, and I know it now almost like the back of my hand. Yes, I was given directions, but still, to find an address in the dark, being a little anxious about the reason I was going to this address, and thinking about my trip overseas the next morning, had me a bit on shpilkes (pins and needles). As I turned onto her street, a song by U2 was playing on the radio, and I heard: "...and I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." How the heck did Bono know to sing that right then, right at the moment that I was gonna park the car and visit a shadchan because I still hadn't found what I was looking for? I thought perhaps it was a sign from above. Perhaps just a confirmation of what I already knew about myself, or maybe my visit would open new doors....
Okay, so I had to wait several more years to find what I was looking for; but the shoe finally fit -- very comfortably -- and I didn't plan to look at any other sizes or styles!
And for coincidence's sake:
Some close friends of ours told us three years ago that they'd be moving. They told us the name of the street and house number. Funny, but that street name sounded vaguely familiar to me, and then I had a hunch. I pulled out a journal from several years back, skimmed through to a particular time frame, and found what I was looking for. Rebbetzin Lori Palatnik had lived on that street, at that house number. There had been one or two other homeowners between the Palatniks and my friends who bought the house, but I found it interesting that the first time I'd walked into that house, I'd been VERY VERY VERY SINGLE, but the next time I walked in, it was with a husband and three children in tow.
