Several years ago I went on the CFI cruise to the Caribbean. I arrived a day early in Orlando and stayed overnight in Orlando’s airport hotel. The next morning at the shuttle service parking area to the cruise ship, I overheard some people talking, and especially some “skeptic buzz words”… and recognized one of the people seated waiting for the shuttle, Eddie Tabash. I asked if I could join them because I recognized him from his lecture at CFI-Los Angeles just a few months earlier, and even remembered that at the time, his favorite candidate for president was General Wesley Clark.

Eddie sat by me in the bus to the ship, and we talked about a lot of skeptic trivia, and boarded the ship together. He promised to introduce me to CFI Founder Paul Kurtz and some of the other luminaries who would be on the cruise, and we went on some of the shore excursions together.

Toward the end of the cruise, we were waiting in line for our dinner seating, and he was complaining about how much work would be awaiting him when he returned to Los Angeles. I offered to help him, and he kidded that he couldn’t wait for me to finish law school. I said I used to do office work part-time for my father who had a civil litigation practice. He asked my father’s name. I told him, and he said, “You are Myron’s daughter?”

It turned out that when Eddie was just beginning to practice law, he came up against my father in court a few times, and my dad cleaned his clock. Eddie had been working for a law firm that was sending him on fools’ errands, and my dad would invite him back to his office, and encourage him to do himself a favor and leave that firm. My dad could see that Eddie was a smart man whose talent was being wasted. Evidently, Eddie took that advice, because he now has his own practice specializing in Constitutional law.

We went to tell Dr. Kurtz about our amazing coincidence — but all Paul would say is “All those lawyers know each other….” I never did help Eddie with his mountain of work after the cruise.  But even I, a confirmed skeptic, and Eddie, a more-than-confirmed skeptic, were amazed at the unlikely confluence of our paths crossing aboard a cruise ship full of skeptics after his friendship with my father that didn’t involve me at all.

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