Story by Debra Annand (BBO: hampton55)

In July 2025, I received a message on Facebook from someone I had not seen in 53 years. I grew up in Yokohama, Japan, in the 60s and early 70s, and this was someone I had gone to high school with there. Both of our fathers were in the Navy. He said he was coming through my hometown after a trip and asked if I would be interested in having coffee. Of course, I was thrilled. I always love seeing people I went to school with in Japan because it is kind of unusual for us to find each other.

We finally met on August 11, a day I will never forget. I happened to mention that I had become a competitive duplicate bridge player, and he sort of mumbled that he had been tooling around on BBO, playing mindlessly with the robots. It turns out he had grown up playing bridge with his family and had played bridge in college in the mid 70s, but then stopped playing for 50 years.

I looked at him and said, "Well, you're playing now with me." We now play three times a week on BBO and take a lesson once a week with my resident guru here on BBO. He lives in another state, so BBO is the perfect place for us to get together and play a game that he is really good at.

It has been so amazing to me to reconnect with someone from my past from another country and to play a game that we are both passionate about.