The minute I got bumped from my return flight, the thought crossed my mind that fate may be conspiring to grant a wish.

I had told my husband, when he drove me to the airport for this trip with my sisters, that this would be the year that I would actively try to visit a few dear friends I hadn't seen in decades -- my best friends from childhood and high school.

So many friendships are born of convenience, of our proximity to the people in our neighborhoods, schools, churches and workplaces. And even in this highly connected digital age, when people move away, the nature of those friendships change.

You can't just show up at the doorstep with good or bad news or when you're simply bored. When most of your travel is done to visit families and for work, a trip to visit an old friend, not prompted by a major life event, can be impossible to work into the schedule.

I met Kauser 30 years ago during our weekend religious instruction at the mosque. At first, we appeared to have nothing in common: She was born in Pakistan and came to America when she was 5. I had been born here. She was the youngest in her family, a social butterfly and wild child. I was the eldest, nerdy and pretty hopelessly square. We didn't attend the same school or travel in similar social circles.

But we both loved to laugh, and brought out a side of each other that most didn't see.

With her, I talked about boys, not books. We spent hours on the phone through those turbulent middle school years. We spent weekends together at the mosque in Houston.

She moved to Dallas right before we started high school. Even though I wouldn't see her as often, she was the sort of person who made an effort to keep in touch. She wrote notes and sent cards long before Facebook reminders nudged us to post birthday greetings on virtual walls.

Twice a year, on her birthday and mine, we would set aside a good part of the evening to catch up on the phone. She came to my wedding, and I was a part of hers a decade ago.

That was the last time we actually saw one another, despite my frequent trips to see my family in Houston. The stars never quite aligned for us to be in the same city at the same time.

And then, last weekend, Southwest Airlines oversold my return flight to St. Louis. I volunteered for another flight that would take me through Dallas, but then that flight was delayed more than an hour, leaving me just minutes to make the connection to St. Louis.

When I saw the delay, I wondered if the wish I had spoken two days earlier to my husband had mysteriously been heard.

I texted Kauser and told her I was flying through Dallas and might miss my connection.

"If I end up staying overnight, please come see me," I wrote. She asked for my travel information and said she would keep an eye on the flights.

En route to Dallas, I asked the flight attendant what my chances were of making my connection. She assured me the crew would wait since it was the last flight out that night and my previous flight had been delayed.

"We waited half an hour for a passenger yesterday," she said.

As we got closer to landing, I turned my phone on and saw a message that had been sent minutes earlier: "I'm here. I just need to find you."

I smiled and shook my head. Why did she drive half an hour out to the airport on a chance?

"Where are you?" I wrote back. "I'm still in the air. We haven't even landed."

"Girl, you better turn that phone off before I tell the pilot!"

Kauser said she was waiting down by the baggage claim, and I kept texting her updates: "We've landed, but I'm still on the plane."

"It's boarding," she wrote back about my connecting flight. She told me I was landing at Gate 7 and needed to race to Gate 3 to make the connection.

I sort of rushed to Gate 3. The ticker above the gate didn't say St. Louis.

"Haha! It already departed!!!" my friend texted.

The gate agent apologized and booked me on a flight for the next morning.

I walked down to the baggage claim, stopping to reapply some lip gloss and fix my hair.

We hugged each other tightly when we met. There is a joy in being able to physically hold a person you have known and loved for such a long time.

"The airline gave me a voucher for a hotel," I said.

She raised an eyebrow at me.

"And what exactly do you want to do with that?"

She drove me to her house and made me eat a late dinner. So much in our lives had changed in the past decade, but the ease of our conversation was the same.

While I was eating, she brought out a cheap porcelain figurine I had given her in 1987, the year we turned 13, the year she moved. On the bottom, I had scrawled in pencil: "Remember: You may look 'picture perfect' on the outside, but it's on the inside what counts. Love ya lots."

In the course of the next 27 years, I figured out what counted.

Some friendships last a season.

Others are meant for a lifetime.

Jen Popps changed into her depression clothes and sunk into the couch.

She prepared herself for the call from the nurse. It was never what they wanted to hear, and she had already started spotting.

She and her husband, Chris, had been trying to get pregnant for six years. They had done nine rounds of fertility drugs, nine rounds of intrauterine insemination -- a less-invasive treatment that uses a catheter to put sperm directly into the uterus when a woman is ovulating -- and one round of IVF.

The Popps had only been able to afford that costly treatment because of an inheritance Jen's grandfather had recently left for her.

"You try to be hopeful, but you also don't want to get your hopes up only to have them dashed every time," she said. "The more times we did it, the less optimistic we were each time."

Jen, 33, works as social worker for a rehab and therapy program in St. Louis, and Chris had worked in IT before he lost his job. They had spent about $13,000 on that IVF chance, and then Jen had started spotting.

No baby.

Again.

Their official diagnosis was "unexplained infertility."

"We didn't have any resources to try again," Chris said. It was a difficult time. They were heartbroken and started drifting apart.

"Sex stops becoming an intimate thing, and it becomes like a medical procedure," he said.

They decided to take a break and focus on their relationship. About six months later, a friend of Jen's emailed her a link to the Las Vegas-based Sher Institute for Reproductive Medicine (SIRM), which was running a national contest to give away free IVF cycles. The institute has eight locations, including one in St. Louis.

Jen forwarded the link to her husband and added a note: Let me know what you think. No pressure.

"I didn't know if I could handle it," Chris said. "I didn't know if I wanted to go down this road again." He thought about it and called her at work.

"I think we should do it."

Each couple had to submit a video about their story, which would be posted on Facebook. The 10 highest vote-getters would be considered by a panel of judges, and the winners picked from among them. The Popps worked together on their video, highlighting their deep friendship and how much they adored their nieces.

Once it was posted, it was on.

Jen went into full campaign mode. She posted the video and a plea for votes a couple of times a day on her page. She sent email blasts to her friends and families who were not on Facebook. Their video touched a nerve.

Her co-workers printed fliers and posted them all over the office, reminding people to vote frequently. One friend drove to every nearby McDonald's and Starbucks to vote from as many different IP addresses as possible. The Popps went on a local radio station to talk about their struggles with infertility and ask for votes. They would switch their phones in and out of airplane mode to pick up a new IP address and vote for two-hour stretches.

"We had this army of people to help us," Jen said.

They made the top 10. The day SIRM posted the winners, she and her co-worker kept refreshing the page on her computer. One name popped up. It wasn't them.

She kept refreshing.

And then their video showed up. The institute, which has given away more than 100 free cycles in the past, decided to pick three winners in this round.

"We went wild," Jen said.

Early last year, they had their consultation with Dr. Geoffrey Sher, executive medical director at SIRM, and decided to begin their free IVF cycle in April. Their doctor implanted two embryos on May 7. Ten days later, they would get back the blood-work results.

That morning, Jen started spotting at work. They had been down this road before. She emailed her mother: I don't think it's going to be good news. She came home from work. She and Chris laid on the couch together and cried for a couple of hours.

Finally the nurse called.

"Congratulations. You're pregnant."

"Are you

kidding me? Oh my gosh, I'm sorry I just cursed at you. I don't know what happened."

They posted the news on Facebook right way. So many people had been hoping and praying for them.

They stayed optimistically cautious for months. When they saw the ultrasound showing that they were expecting a boy, it began to feel more real. Around six months, they began to work on the nursery.

Late last month, Jen was induced on a Monday. On Wednesday, Leo Christopher Popp finally arrived.

His parents were very quiet. There were so many emotions.

This day had been so long in the making.

"I can't believe he's here, and I can't believe we get to take him home," Jen said. "This is real."

The confusion about wedding customs began before Robert even had a chance to propose to my sister.

He had arrived at my parents' home in a suit, after trying a case in court, wanting to make his intentions clear. They had already met a few times to discuss their concerns about the possible union. After all, Robert was a black man raised in Mississippi, and my sister had been raised in a Pakistani family in Houston. But Robert and my sister, Rabeea, who had known each other for seven years since law school, were pretty sure they had cleared those hurdles by now.

This meeting would just be a formality.

Robert sat on the sofa, and my father sat across the room in a chair. My mother, called ammi in Urdu, sat in a different corner. There was some polite small talk, and then the room became silent.

"I could hear the tick-tock from the clock," Robert said. "It seemed like you could hear a pin drop."

Finally, Robert said: "I would like to marry your daughter."

"In our culture, we have to talk to the family," my father started. "You have to meet the family; they have to get comfortable with you. Then they'll tell me what they think about you. Then, we'll let you know."

My mother looked at my father. This was not going as she expected.

Robert said it sounded like a good idea, and got up to leave.

Early the next morning, he got a call at work.

It was my father. My mother had told him to call and fix the situation he created.

"I just wanted to let you know that you did OK," my dad said. "Welcome to the family. We're so happy you're going to be our son."

Robert was a little confused, and called my sister, to whom he still had not proposed.

"Once you talk to the parents, you're engaged," she explained.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" he said. (He still had a ring and asked her privately, later.)

Now that they finally had everyone's blessing, they had a wedding to plan. Given the size of our immediate family, the date that worked for everyone was four short months away.

My mother hopped on a flight to Pakistan and set off to get nearly 50 outfits custom-made for the wedding, of which 23 were for the wedding party.

Robert's sisters and niece started researching traditional Pakistani wedding decorations and taught themselves a Bollywood dance for the party before the wedding.

Rabeea wanted the ceremony to reflect both cultures. There was a center aisle and a wedding party -- things familiar to Americans but not typically a part of South Asian weddings. The music ranged from R&B to Indian film songs. And she fought my parents about the menu at the reception: It was going to be pan-seared snapper with blackened chicken and etouffee sauce, rather than the traditional Pakistani cuisine familiar to them and our relatives.

There were compromises on both ends.

The Imam who performed the wedding told my sister he remembers looking into the crowd and seeing that one side of the aisle was African-American and the other Pakistani-American. The couple at the center united the room.

Looking back, there isn't a detail that either of them would change about their wedding, or the celebrations leading up to it.

"I was very, very happy that my family loved Robert, and his family loved me, and everyone was having a good time. I was happy and in love and excited," my sister said.

Robert remembers that phone call that started the ball rolling, from the man he had worked so hard to win over. My mom took the phone after my father and offered her congratulations.

Robert had asked: Can I call you ammi now?

Of course, he could.

He was family.