Aruba Encounter

A couple of weeks before we were to leave for a 9-day Caribbean cruise, I was contacted by a woman through an agency that brings us clients who need help with their writing projects. Claudia had a somewhat curious request. She’d completed a science-fiction-fantasy novel that involves some sort of alien contact or intervention, and she wanted me to re-write two of her chapters that take place in Russia. She said  she didn’t want Russia in her novel after what has happened in Ukraine and she had written the chapters before the Russian invasion.

I wasn’t really interested in getting involved in the project because I was trying to wrap up another one before the cruise. So I told her a story of how when I was adapting the script of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I was contacted by George Lucas’ assistant and told that I must remove all references to Turkey from the novel. I responded by saying nearly a third of the book takes place in Turkey. Doesn’t matter, I was told. The Turkish government contacted the American Embassy and registered an official protest. They did not want an Indiana Jones movie or novel using Turkey as a location, because it would insult the people of Turkey. As it turned out, I found out that Turkey – or part of Turkey – was called Hatay in 1938-39. Amazingly, the story takes place in 1938. So Hatay it was.

Claudia was impressed with that story and I told her all she had to do was change the name of the country. She was grateful for my help, maybe because she was used to people charging her for their services and I was not asking any money. I just wanted to move on, and besides she didn’t really need my help. She told me if I was ever in Aruba where she lived, I could stay for free in her beach house-cottage. I responded that actually I would be in Aruba in less than two weeks – but only for a day as part of the cruise Trish and I and daughter Megan would be on. That resulted in an invitation to take us to lunch and later to dinner at her house. We had no idea what to expect.

Once getting off the ship, we were met by the head of Aruba tourism and his assistant, given packaged gifts and when Claudia, arrived she had bouquets of flowers for Trish and Megan. Megan writes for a popular travel blog and that was the reason Claudia asked the tourist folks to meet us. We had a great lunch at the Ritz-Carlton, then were given a tour of an old gold mine and a natural pool in a cave  where adventurous Megan took the 15-foot leap into the pool not once, but three times. Very typical of her. Here’s a link to her leap.

We took a pre-planned catamaran ride from the cruise ship, then were picked up again by the tourism folks and taken to Claudia’s house for dinner. Well, I should say mansion. She and her family apparently are one of the wealthiest families on the island. She had hired the best chef on Aruba and her staff of two served us and kept our wine glasses full. We ate outside at a long table by their pool with his husband, extended family and the tourist people. We were, of course, impressed.

The entire day was a synchronicity. The invitation, the fact that we would actually be in Aruba, that Megan had an assignment to write about Aruba, but also one other thing. The cruise was an Abraham-Hicks event that included four days of workshops featuring Esther Hicks channeling the entity Abraham, as she has done for more than two decades. If you’re not familiar with the Abraham-Hicks journey, the central message is about the law of attraction. Another way of looking at synchronicity. So we had experienced our own law of attraction-synchronicity while cruising the Caribbean on a cruise dedicated to that very experience.