Lunch with Fellow Hubber: A wonderful Experience

During your journey on hubpages you make the choice of whether or not to become part of the community and share your life and experiences with other HubPage writers. Many writers are eager to take part, and others choose to remain anonymous, rarely sharing any personal information about where they live and who they are.

I met Randi(BTRBell) here on Hubpages about two months ago and started reading her charming and interesting hubs. I really enjoyed the Miriam's kitchen series since I have family in Israel. We started following each other and reading each other's hubs like supportive hubbers that we are.

We shared a few emails back and forth, and I suggested we meet for lunch sometime since we both live in Arizona. She thought that was a pretty good idea. I do get down to Phoenix every so often and it only takes me about an hour and a half to get to most areas in the city. We decided to meet at Scottsdale Fashion Square, which is very posh shopping mall in Scottsdale. The mall has a large food court, so we could choose what to eat and sit as long as we wanted.

Randi and I felt we knew a little about each other from emails and writing. We viewed each other's pictures on different hubs, so recognizing each other would not be a problem. I offered to have a rose between my teeth, but we thought it would not be necessary. Since both of us posted fairly current pictures we did recognize each other. However, though she resembled her picture she was much more attractive in person.

I was looking for someone who was overweight! However Randi certainly was not overweight, and looked very trim when I met her. After he wrote hubs about losing and gaining weight after she broke her foot I expected her to be out of shape. Not at all!

She brought her son Ben along with her, and he planned to walk through the mall and do some window shopping. By the way Scottsdale Fashion Square is beautiful enclosed mall with many designer and fine shops as well as very fancy gourmet restaurants. I remember this mall years ago when we lived in Scottsdale, and there were a few department stores and other other shops and it was open. Shopping there in the hot summer was not fun. Ben ended up spending quite a bit of time talking with us, and I found him to be a delightful young man.

Reality has nothing to do with what you anticipate. Anticipation of anything in life is always worse, better or just different. I like to think my reality check was in neutral before meeting Randi. The good news was that I found her to be a delightful conversationalist and of good heart and spirit. We rarely took a breath between words.

Both of us are good talkers and good listeners. We both come from the same ethnic background of Judaism. We delved into relationships with significant others and good friends. Randi is an Oculist and I got to learn more about the role of the Oculist in the world of vision.

HubPages was a major topic of discussion during our lunch. We talked about the different writers that we both follow and learning about them through writing, reading and commenting. We both agreed that you really don't know anyone until you meet with them in person. It is that eye to eye contact that really tells a lot. Fortunately we both felt very comfortable to share our lives. We were both comfortable enough with each other to open up about the challenges and problems we have encountered in the past. She told me some stories about her experiences living in a small village in Israel, which I found most interesting. We covered as much as we could in two hours. We laughed about the humor in writing and the sadness; and how much we both have learned from reading other hubs.

Our religious background gave us a bond in our same religious views as well as we found we have similar political views. We are both interested in eating healthy and exercising. Since we are both writers we talked about what we have written and what we plan to write.

The most important thing we had in common was that we just enjoyed meeting each other, talking and sharing as if we had known each other for years. Even though we are both optimists in general, we agreed that one does not get through life without many challenges and problems.

We left our lunch with promises of getting together again. She said she would make the trek up to Prescott so I could show her around. We have been in touch since the lunch and I would venture to say I have a lovely new friend.

She is very real and willing to share her life both good and bad. She has this tremendous spirit for life that is rare. Yes, she has had her share of challenges but lives a life of joy. How do I know this? It only takes me a few minutes of eye contact to know the reality behind the person.

I sincerely like the way she handles her life. She has had to deal with a lot of challenges in her life and has handled them a lot better than I would have. One of the things I most admire about her is the quality of her writing. She is an excellent writer and I sincerely hope she continues on. Before meeting her in person I was very impressed at how super bright and well informed she is.

Not to be redundant--the most important revelation was that I her a lot and feel she is like someone I have known for a long time and liked for a long time. So here is to a long friendship that started at HubPages.

Writing is a lonely activity and being able to share with other writers is uplifting and inspiring. Meeting another writer in person is the best. There are many ups and downs in the writing life, and being able to share and connect helps the writing spirit a lot.