I Lost $6,750 Playing Poker at a Fundraiser for My Kids’ School.

Drinking beer and playing cards with school administrators and other parents, I realized I’d made a huge mistake.

My chips from that horrible night.

When my wife and I moved from Southern Colorado to Northern Colorado so she could get a dance degree at CU Boulder, we both knew it would involve some major changes to life as we knew it.

While we’re both originally from California, all five of our kids were born in Colorado Springs, and it was all they had ever known. At the time, our oldest was 8, and our youngest was 3, so moving away meant we’d be leaving behind everything and everyone they knew.

Some of the changes that moving would bring were going to be hard, like starting over in a new city, moving to a new neighborhood, making new friends, etc. But there were other changes we were excited about (like the fact that Northern Colorado actually has water! There are lakes everywhere!).

One of the changes I was most excited about was that we might be able to send our kids to a private school for the first time ever. Our school-aged kids had been homeschooled in the beginning, then we switched to a “cottage school” program in partnership with a local charter school and then moved them to full-blown, full-time charter school attendance.

The charter school was okay but not great. I had some respect for the leadership, but some of the teachers were just awful, and our kids weren’t thriving.

Mostly, though, I didn’t like that it was a public school teaching a secular education. Even before I became a parent, I knew I never wanted to put my kids into a normal “public school” anyway, so we were awkwardly straddling the fence already.

I didn’t want what happened to most of my peers growing up to happen to my kids: this bizarre American phenomenon where Christian parents raise kids and take them to church on Sundays but also send them to a thoroughly anti-Christian environment five days a week and are somehow shocked that their kids turn out to hate them and everything they believe after 12 years.

This cognitive dissonance is utterly overwhelming, and in my opinion, this is the weirdest thing Christian parents do.

I had never wanted my kids to get a “public school” education, but my wife and I quickly found out that homeschooling wasn’t the right choice for us, which is why we tried the charter school. And that was okay, but it clearly also wasn’t the right choice.

But what was? What other option was there?

Well, there was one other option, but it would be far too much to ask for. Surely, it would be far too expensive for a family like ours. It almost seemed outrageous to even consider such an option.

That one remaining option was something I could barely say out loud: it seemed almost too holy for my lips to utter:

Private Christian school.

We were a one-income family with five children. There was no way we’d ever be able to afford sending our kids to private Christian school. And it wasn’t just us: we didn’t even know anybody else who did (or could).

And yet… when I took a scouting trip up to Boulder County, where I was looking at moving, I did look into it.

I dared to utter the words out loud... to Betsy, as it turned out.

Betsy was the admissions coordinator at the private Christian school that I met with in person to discuss the possibility of all five of our kids attending, as absurd as that thought was.

When I first walked into the school lobby to meet with her, I felt like a teenager walking into a Lamborghini dealership, asking if I could test drive the cars.

I had no business being here, I thought.

I was wasting her time.

Surely, this was all a big lark, and I was just dreaming. My delusions of grandeur would end soon, and I’d come crashing back to earth when I found out how much it would cost; then, I’d thank her for her time and apologize for wasting her afternoon.

But as it turned out, miraculously, it looked like we could indeed send our kids to this private Christian school. Paying tuition for my kids to go to school would be the hardest thing I would have ever done financially, but it would be worth it.

It wasn’t completely cost-prohibitive after all: we would receive a “bulk discount” for sending more than one child there, and the discounts got bigger for each additional kid.

The first student would be full price; the second would get a percentage off; the third would get a higher percentage off, and so on.

But still, when we added it all up, my bill was going to be enormous: my monthly payment would be much, much more than what I was paying for housing.

But it would be worth it.

With this new option that I had never considered before, my wife and I could go back to just being our kids’ parents and not have to also serve as teacher and principal. That would be nice.

Most importantly, though, as a private Christian school, they believed the same things I did.

My kids would get a Christian education, complete with bible classes, singing hymns, prayer time, and chapel on Wednesdays.

I wouldn’t have to fight with school boards about woke nonsense in the classrooms and curriculum or teachers indoctrinating my kids with beliefs that were opposed to mine. This was exactly what I wanted and hoped for.

It seemed there was an option for us. It was very expensive, but it did exist.

Actually, when I finished all the paperwork and met the teachers, and our kids were finally all enrolled at the new school, I started to feel outraged.

I was angry that nobody in my life—no parent, no friend, no adult I had ever met anywhere in my entire parenting experience—had ever suggested we look into private school.

Why not?

I felt like a dummy for not having thought of it sooner. Yes, it costs a lot of money. But it was going to be worth it: what is more important in my life than my own kids?

And, as it turned out, contrary to what I’d assumed, it was actually doable.

How was it doable? Partly, as I mentioned, due to getting discounts for sending multiple kids there at the same time, but it was also partly due to scholarships.

What were scholarships? Having been homeschooled myself, I had no idea what scholarships were. Well, I’d heard of them, of course, but I’d never gotten one and didn’t know they worked. Where did the money come from? How were scholarships funded?

That’s when I discovered two things: donor funds and fundraisers.

Donor funds were, just like they sounded, funds given to the school by donors who gave money, usually because:

1. They were wealthy.

2. They wanted to support the school.

3. They wanted to help kids attend who otherwise couldn’t afford to.

Fundraisers were, also just like they sounded, where the school raised funds. Obviously.

But what I quickly learned is that private school fundraisers are absolutely nothing like public school or charter school fundraisers.

When our kids went to the charter school, they held fundraisers all the time. There were bake sales where you could buy things like cookies and cupcakes, and there were “bring a dollar to school and wear a purple shirt day” and other things that were low in cost and often seemed silly.

The SILLIEST fundraiser of all was one that started as a cute little joke but grew totally out of control — “Smencils.”

Apparently, kids were able to buy “Smencils” (smelly pencils, get it?) that smelled like certain scents for $1.00. No big deal, right?

Well, it was fine for a while until it turned into a competitive thing where kids would fight about who had the coolest Smencils, certain scents of Smencils, the right color Smencils, or the most Smencils.

At a certain point, when my kids were begging for yet another dollar to buy yet another smelly pencil, I recall hearing myself shouting out loud something that went like:

NO MORE SMENCILS! I AM NOT PAYING FOR ANOTHER SMENCIL EVER AGAIN FOR AS LONG AS I LIVE!!

So… suffice it to say, I did have some experience with fundraisers at the charter school, but only in a small—and thoroughly annoying—way.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

Soon after we moved up north and enrolled all five of our kids in the school, we were invited to the annual fundraising dinner at a local hotel and conference center. My wife hates these kinds of social gatherings, so I went by myself because I don’t mind them at all.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to meet some of the teachers, donors, and parents of the other kids… and that’s exactly what happened.

It was a delightful evening with a nice dinner, nice conversation, meeting the kids’ nice teachers, and nice donors, and the nice school administrators and parents. I got exactly what I wanted out of the evening. It was all very nice.

But the amount of money raised that night took my breath away.

Let’s just say that this school had no need for selling Smencils: I watched in real-time as the total amount raised, through silent auctions and simple donation pledges topped something like $350,000.

Obviously, nobody expected me to buy anything, and I joked with a few people at my table that my contribution to the school was simply paying tuition for five kids.

“Five kids? You have FIVE KIDS going to this school?!” people asked, gasping in amazement. “How do you do that?”

“Through the generous contributions of donors like you!” I said, only half-jokingly.

I didn’t want to feel like I was only on the receiving end, though, so I wanted to buy at least one item or make at least a token donation as a gesture of thanks. I didn’t want any of the large items (okay, that’s a lie—I definitely did want the getaway package of a weeklong stay at a luxury resort in Hawaii, but I obviously couldn’t afford that)… but I finally found something worth paying for.

I paid $50 to attend “Poker Night at the Campbell House.”

This would be perfect. Unlike buying a piece of art I didn’t like or a book I would never read, this item involved meeting other people.

I didn’t know any of the parents at the school yet, and even though it was nice to meet many of the people on this night at the fundraiser, it was far too big an event to get to know anybody well, and it was loud and overstimulating. I probably wouldn’t be able to remember everyone’s names, much less build a relationship with them.

So a fun evening at another family’s house would be just the thing: I could make some friends and find some families there with kids the same age as mine.

Plus, the price was right: at $50, I felt like I had given some money to the school in this fundraiser and didn’t walk out empty-handed. I had contributed somewhat.

Now, I didn’t care about poker at all (and still don’t). I also didn’t know how to play poker (and still don’t). But I was desperate to make friends and figured people would explain how it all worked.

When I went up to collect the item I bid on, I brought back to my table a giant printed ticket that said, “One Entry to Poker Night at the Campbell House.” A few people at my table asked what I bought.

“Ooooh, wow, poker night at the Campbells’? You’re going to have a blast!” one woman said. Other people at the table agreed, nodding in agreement and smiling.

“You made a good choice,” one said. “The Campbells are famous for their poker nights. You’ll have a great time.”

“But I don’t know how to play poker!” I admitted. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem at all. You’ll pick it up fast enough,” she said. “It will be fine. Trust me.”

Okay, I thought. This will be great.

I’ll get to spend a quiet evening at another school family’s house and get to meet them. I can learn more about the school and finally learn to play poker.

A few weeks later, when poker night came, I got in my car and headed to the address on my ticket. I drove far out into the country in the breathtakingly beautiful greenway that surrounds the city of Boulder.

The closer I got, the larger the homes became.

“Oh, wow, they must be one of the big donors,” I said as I finally pulled up to the house.

There were so many cars that the driveway was completely full, and I had to park on the street. I got out of the car and started walking down the driveway.

A huge house that looked like a mansion from Aspen or Vail loomed in the distance behind the carefully manicured trees. I walked up to the front door and knocked. Someone let me in, and I stepped inside to see a massive timber-framed great room with exposed beams like I’d just walked into a ski resort lobby.

People were laughing and talking, drinking beer, and music was playing. It was a little surreal to see the school principal standing there, greeting me in such a nice house like this. I fished a beer out of the cooler next to an enormous poker table in the living room.

This was not exactly what I had in mind, I thought, looking around at the casino-styled decorations. I munched on some snacks as we sat down at the poker table, sipping my beer as people still milled around the room, laughing and carrying on in their individual conversations.

I had only ever played poker once in my life before, at a friend’s surprise 30th birthday party. It was the manliest thing ever: just five or six guys sitting at a tiny round table in a dark, empty warehouse, and we played cards while smoking cigars and talking about which of us had already gotten a vasectomy and which of us was still deciding on getting one or not.

That evening was… kind of fun.

But it was so annoying that everybody around the table—as small as it was—had already known how to play poker.

Where do people find the time to learn to play poker? I wondered, confounded at the mystery of it all.

How the hell did these guys my age—all fathers themselves, like me—not only know how to play poker but had spent enough time playing it to become good at it?

I am still completely mystified by this and think it’s one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

Is there a “poker school” out there somewhere that everybody except me—men AND women—went to? Was poker a class taught to kids who went to public school, and I just missed it because I was homeschooled?

I didn’t even know if I owned a deck of cards, and these guys were basically performing magic tricks right in front of me like it was no big deal: dealing and shuffling, cutting the deck, performing rainbows, and flicking cards with precision like it was something they’d been doing since they were children.

How? Why? Where? When? I wondered.

I tried not to show my frustration then and just relied on the “birthday boy” to tell me how to play. This quickly became annoying for the other guys, though, and at one point in the evening, one of them said, “This needs to stop” because it was basically cheating.

So I stopped playing cards and just sat there, smoking my cigar, watching them do these strange hand gyrations and use terms that sounded like nonsense (“call,” “bluff,” “raise,” “ante,” and a lot more), and throw around cards like they’d done it for years. It was annoying and lonely experience.

At the Campbells’ house, when the “dealer” showed up at our poker table this time around, I started feeling panicky, remembering that awkward night years ago when I felt like I ruined someone’s birthday party or at least shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Was that going to happen again? Was I going to need so much help that I would annoy the other members until someone else complained, and I’d have to sit there in shame, unable to understand what was going on?

I’m doing this for a good cause… I told myself.

This is a fundraiser. This is supposed to be fun. Surely, they’ll be nice about it.

Well, first things first, I found out that this wasn’t a poker night after all; it was a “Texas Hold ‘Em” night. And somehow, in some way, this had something to do with poker… or it was poker… but different somehow.

That didn’t make any sense to me, but I just went with it, suppressing my urge to ask a hundred questions and trying not to lose my cool. Not only did I not know how to play poker, but I really didn’t know how to play Texas Holdup or whatever it was called.

I just kept thinking about how the lady at the auction told me it would be fun, and I didn’t have to know how to play. I hoped she was right. I had watched a bunch of YouTube videos before I went to try to get a head start, but that wasn’t helpful at all: I just couldn’t make sense of it.

This is a fundraiser, I kept saying to myself. They’re not going to expect me to be an expert.

I still cannot understand anything on this card.

The dealer gave us all a bunch of chips and a little laminated card explaining “hands” and their definitions: a royal flush, a straight flush, four of a kind, a full house, etc.

He then explained the rules, and by that, I mean the “rules of the house,” not the actual rules of poker, which I was clearly already expected to know.

Most people nodded in agreement with him as though they understood what he was saying. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but I figured they’d help me understand later.

As I stared down at the pile of chips in front of me, I started getting really nervous. This all seemed very serious and formal: way, way more serious than the birthday party I’d been to years ago. This dealer seemed really professional and wore a little green visor and everything, and these chips looked and felt like “real” poker chips if that was even a thing.

I wondered if I’d gotten myself in over my head and was making a big mistake.

As people were milling about, getting another beer, and slowly finding their way to the tables, I got to know my table mates.

The young man next to me was a chubby, bald guy from Australia who was, apparently, married to the American woman sitting a few seats to my right. I wanted to know more about them.

Who were they, how did they meet, and did we have any kids in the same classes as mine?

Ben Lacrosse, as it turned out, did indeed have kids in the same classes as ours. In fact, he had five kids, just like we did.

And his wife’s name was Rachel, just like my wife’s name.

What luck!

Here I was, at my first-ever event for the families of this private Christian school, and I just happened to be sitting next to a family that looked almost exactly like mine. For Pete’s sake, his wife, Rachel, had hair the exact same color and length as my wife, Rachel, did, and it seemed to be the exact same height and build.

What were the odds? It was uncanny.

I learned how Ben grew up in Australia, used to work in Christian music production, and came to America while on tour with TobyMAC, the rapper. …which was also how he met his wife, who also worked in Christian music production.

These days, they were living just outside Boulder, and he was working for Google, which was crazy: we were also living just outside Boulder, and I was (at the time) working for a coding bootcamp that had Google employees as part-time instructors, and we sometimes placed graduates in roles at companies like Google.

“This is amazing!” I said. “We should get our families together sometime!”

“Yes, we should,” he responded.

Boy, this night was going to turn out great after all.

Then the poker (err—Texas Hold ‘Em) game started, and I snapped out of my fantasy of a future where my family, Ron and Rachel, with five kids, would become best friends with that other family, Ben and Rachel, with five kids.

The seriousness hit me again as the game started, and I was reminded that I had no idea how to play at all. I didn’t want to annoy people, so at the outset, I said, “Just so everybody knows, I don’t really know how to play this game. I’ve only played poker once. I’m sorry if I do a really bad job.”

“Just watch for a few hands,” one man sitting across the table suggested.

That was a great idea. It was low impact: I could watch and see what people were doing and saying and not lose any of my chips.

I tried to find someone at the table who would help show me the ropes without making fun of me, and I found someone to be my advocate: a middle-aged single woman without any kids (and therefore, whose connection to the school I couldn’t understand) who made custom cakes for a living.

She was fairly helpful to me as the game progressed but kept asking Ben if he could help her get a job at Google. After the third or fourth time she mentioned it, I asked Ben, “I’ll bet the worst part about working at Google is that everybody you meet asks you that, huh?”

He agreed. “Yes, people ask that all the time… but I’m not in HR, so I can’t really do anything about it.”

I thought I got the basic idea of the game as I watched them play and eventually joined them to start playing “for real.”

I looked at the big pile of chips I had, and after I started losing a few of them, I wondered what this fundraiser was going to cost me when I finally lost the game, as I was sure I would.

These stupid things are going to cost me HOW MUCH?!?!

I asked the cake maker casually, “So what are these chips worth, anyway? How many dollars?”

She looked over the pile and started counting them in whispered tones, half-talking to herself.

“Well, these are $500, these are $250, and these are $100, so…”

My eyes grew enormous as I heard the size of the numbers that were rolling off her tongue.

“It looks like we all have $6,750 in chips.”

My stomach nearly fell out of my abdomen and sank into the floor, and my heart started thumping so loudly I could hear my pulse.

I broke into a sweat as I realized what a horrible mistake I’d made.

I was playing poker with almost $7,000 in chips?!

When I came here tonight, I figured the buy-in would be maybe $100 or $200 total. Clearly, I should have asked how much we were going to have to spend before I sat down.

Now, I was mad at myself.

DARN IT!

Why didn’t I ask before I sat down and agreed to play this stupid game? Actually, why didn’t they tell us? Nobody ever mentioned how much money we were playing for before we started! Why not?!

AND WHY DOES NOBODY EVER EXPLAIN ANYTHING? WHY DO YOU ALWAYS JUST HAVE TO KNOW THIS SHIT?!

I had signed up to play this stupid game to try to make friends and raise a little money for the school. But now, here I was, on the hook for $7,000 worth of chips in a poker game I was sure I would lose.

How did every person in this giant house that looks like a mountain chalet from the Swiss Alps know how to play this stupid Texan version of poker? And why were they all acting like $7,000 was no big deal?

Obviously, almost everyone there was extremely wealthy except maybe the cake maker and myself. Maybe this was all a drop in the bucket for them, but I couldn’t afford to lose $7,000 in a poker game! …at a school fundraiser!

I loved the school so far, and I was glad my kids could go there, but I was miffed.

WHY DOES EVERYBODY HERE SEEM TO THINK THAT DRINKING AND GAMBLING IS AN APPROPRIATE “FUNDRAISER” FOR A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL?

The whole reason I was sending my kids to this school was because it was a private Christian school and would teach them the Christian principles that I valued.

…or would they? What did this school stand for, anyway?

This whole thing was SO stupid it was making me long for the old days at the charter school where the kids would ask me to buy muffins at their bake sales.

IT EVEN MADE ME MISS THOSE STUPID SMENCILS!

I would have rather bought my kids a thousand smelly pencils than be here right now looking at all these stupid poker chips.

I was nauseous.

I was dizzy.

I was sweating.

My hands were trembling, and my lips quivered as I repeated back those stupid words they were all saying:

“I fold.”

“I see your X and raise you Y.”

“I’m upping the ante.”

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? WHO CARES? WHY DO PEOPLE THINK THIS IS FUN?

There was now a major predicament, I started to realize. At the end of the night, when the game was over, and we went to cash in our chips, I was going to have to admit to the dealer that I couldn’t afford to pay what I owed.

How would I ever save face?

Here we were: a brand new family in a brand new city, with all five of my kids going to a brand new school, and I had just ruined it forever.

I was in the same room with the teachers, donors, and other parents of students—and the school principal—and I was going to have to confess that I had just racked up thousands in gambling debts that I couldn’t pay.

AT. A. SCHOOL. FUNDRAISER.

I would now owe the school almost $7,000, not in tuition, but in a losing poker game.

Why and how is my life always filled with such absurd circumstances like this? How do I constantly get into these kinds of predicaments? This evening was so surreal I could barely believe this was real life.

There was only one thing I could do now: gamble.

Literally, all I could do was play the hand I was dealt and see if I could get lucky at the table.

But I’m not a good gambler. And I’m a horrible poker player. And I hate poker, but now, I also hate people who like poker.

They were all having so much fun, and I couldn’t make any sense of it.

Even Rachel, that mother of five children, married to the fat, balding Googler from down under, was having a blast. She was remarkably spunky.

She was spunky!

SPUNKY!!

How does a mother of five kids get to be spunky?!

How does a mother of five kids get to be good at poker?

How does a mother of five kids even like poker?

And didn’t she know how high these stakes were? This was a serious game, and $6,750 wasn’t chump change!

She even started taunting her husband in an aggressive and flirtatious way.

“Oooooh, you’re going down, Ben Lacrosse! Just watch how hard you fall!”

None of this made any sense to me, so I just tried to put on a “poker face,” but for a very different reason than everyone else. As I watched the players make their bets and pushed my chips into the pot, ever slower and more timidly each time, I was counting in my head, thinking of solutions, coming up with answers, and praying.

Let’s see: if I do a cash advance on my Capital One credit card, I think I can get about $3,000 from that…

And if I get a cash advance on my Discover card, I think I can maybe get $2,000 from that. But then I’m still more than $1,000 short. What can I do?

I know: I’ll take a draw on my business line of credit and pay myself, then use that to cover the whole thing. Then I won’t have to use the credit cards at all…

I kept looking at my phone that was hiding in my lap, checking the various balances of my bank accounts and credit cards.

Trying to come up with almost $7,000 on the spot was going to be nearly impossible unless I started making some transfers right away.

But even then, I still had so many questions. When the game was over, and we had to settle up, how would that work?

• What if I still had some chips left? How would I know how much I owe?

• Did they take credit cards? Is that a stupid question to even ask?

• Would I embarrass myself if I had to use multiple credit cards?

• Did I have to pay right now, or could they give me a few days?

• If I couldn’t pay, would they write me an I.O.U. like in the movies?

• Would they charge interest on my balance?

• Who was responsible for keeping track of all of this?

I just wanted the game to end so it could all be over. But I also wanted it to last forever so I would never have to go through what I knew was awaiting me.

I was having visions of myself standing near the door, settling up with the man in the green visor, where everybody could see, as I pulled out various debit and credit cards:

“Let’s see, I’ll put $2,000 on this one,” I’d say, swiping one card, then I’d whip out another. “And I’ll put $2,000 on this one—wait, no, hold on, make that $1,500,” over and over until my balance finally read “$0” or until one of my cards was declined.

Whatever was going to happen, I would probably embarrass myself forever and start a rumor that would spread around the school. I could hear it now:

“Did you hear about that new family, the Stauffers? They’re the ones who just moved here from Colorado Springs. Apparently, they’re really poor, and the dad has a gambling habit: he lost almost $7,000 at the school fundraiser. Can you believe it?”

I was also mortified about what I was going to tell my wife. How could I possibly explain all of this? She would be so mad at me for losing that much money. …over gambling, no less! …at a school fundraiser, no less!

What kind of parent was I? What kind of father? What kind of horrible role model? What would this say to the kids about money? What would it say to the school about me?

Would the school even let our kids keep going there? Do they accept families that rack up thousands of dollars at a fundraiser but can’t pay it?

I kept playing the game, praying for a miracle.

None came.

At one point, I said something like, “I’m all in,” and put in the very last of my chips.

And lost all of them.

It was over.

I tried to play it cool.

Just remain calm, Ron. Stay calm. Act like you know what you’re doing.

I don’t remember exactly how it all ended.

I may have gotten another beer (for that much money, I should have taken several!) or maybe timidly sipped on some water. I sat there, watching everyone else to see what they would do.

They were going to get up, cash out, and leave, right? Then I could watch them and just do what they do.

But no, most of the people were staying.

They wanted to play another game!

There was no way in hell I was doing that. I told Ben and Rachel goodbye, got Ben’s contact info, and told him I’d email him so we could get our families together sometime.

I eventually found the woman whose house we had been staying in, and shook her hand, thanking her for opening up her beautiful home for a fun evening, and told her I needed to leave.

She asked me a few questions: where had we just moved from, how did we like the school, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH—it was all meaningless banter, and I knew I was just dancing around the question I knew I’d have to ask.

Finally, I just came out and said it.

“So… where’s the dealer? Do I need to, like… cash out or something?”

“Huh?” She said, confused.

“Oh, goodness, no, honey,” she started laughing. “You didn’t think we were playing… for… real money… did you?”

A wave of extremely intense emotion crashed into me and nearly knocked me over.

I repeated her words back slowly, in a daze.

“Playing… for… real… money….”

“Oh, no! No! Of course not! Real money! Hahaha… that’s funny, no, I know better than that. No, no, hahaha. How funny…”

I fake laughed my way out of the house, into the driveway, and started walking back to my car.

I was pretend laughing before, but now I was really laughing. Laughing at the stupidity of it all and how angry it made me.

I was hurt, livid, sad, and confused.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to vomit.

I wanted to go away and never see rich people like that ever again, never go inside a giant mansion like that ever again, never participate in a fundraiser like that ever again, and never, ever play poker ever again.

Especially not Texas Hold ‘Em.

After a few weeks, I thought the whole evening was a bizarre, awful experience, but at least my family would now have some great family friends since we’d get to know the Lacrosse family, so it was all worth it.

Except I never heard from the Lacrosse family ever again.

A few months went by, and I saw Ben and Rachel a few times at school functions, but they didn’t seem to recognize me, and it was clear they didn’t really want to get to know us at all.

I guess if you’re a man with an Australian accent that everyone thinks is hilarious who works for Google, where everyone else on earth wants to work, and if you’re a woman who is spunky and flirtatious and loves playing poker… perhaps everybody else likes you so much that you’re just swimming in bucketloads of friends and don’t need any more.

When I saw them, I couldn’t even bear the thought of walking up to them and saying, “Hey, it’s me, Ron Stauffer. Remember the guy from that awkward poker game fundraiser?”

In the end, I lost at poker. I didn’t actually lose $7,000. Thank God for that.

But I also lost what I thought could be a great potential friendship, and I lost some of my zeal for private Christian schools, along with some of my desire to ever be a part of a group of “normal” people who always seem to understand what’s going on.

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