Photography teacher Ryan Bowden recalls waving his grandmother off when, upon his moving to California, she predicted he would fall in love with a surfer girl—a prediction that held true.
The Bowdens, now both teaching at Trinity, attributed their series of chance meetings to fate.
“Call me crazy,” sixth grade English teacher Lenna Bowden said, “but there was definitely divine intervention at work. The day before I met him in the ocean, I had a dream where I vividly remember seeing a pair of gorgeous blue eyes. The next day, those eyes were the very ones staring back at me in the water … it was definitely fate!”
Mr. Bowden agreed.
“I’m not sure what you believe, in God or destiny or fate… but it was almost like we were forced together, forced to meet—how everything was just perfectly laid out. The plan was perfect.”
They first met on a beach in California, where they both were avid surfers.
“My roommate and I, we decided to go surfing one afternoon and drove down the California coast… I was kind of goofing around and trying to practice 360’s on my surfboard. I fell off my board, and my wave had caught my surfboard and washed it towards the shore,” Mr. Bowden recalled.
Mrs. Bowden was there to help.
“I grabbed the board, knowing what it’s like when you lose your board in the whitewash and have to swim back in for it. As [I was] towing the board out toward the lineup, a wave crashed in front of me…then as the whitewash settled and the sun was setting into the Pacific, there he was!” Mrs. Bowden said. “The second I saw him, I knew in my soul he was the one.”
“I was thinking…’She’s really pretty,’” Mr. Bowden says. “And so we just talked. All the other surfers were going in because it was getting dark, and we just sat out there in the water and talked—in the ocean, the sun was setting—it was a beautiful night.”
Mr. Bowden kicked himself for not asking for her number—he feared he’d never see her again. But as fate would have it, after a few weeks, he ran into her again. Mr. Bowden, then a college student working to pay tuition, was walking down a busy street for lunch when he saw Mrs. Bowden again—this time dressed up in work clothing with her boss. They greeted each other, but again did not exchange numbers.
Mr. Bowden’s boss playfully hit him on the arm and chastised him for not asking for her number. Just as they were both walking away, Mr. Bowden remembers Mrs. Bowden’s boss speaking up. He told Mr. Bowden where he could find Mrs. Bowden—working as a teller at a nearby Washington Mutual, where Mr. Bowden later tried to find her.
“I walk there, all cas[ual], you know, I kinda had done my hair that day back when I had hair, and I was like, trying to look good. And I look[ed] at all the tellers, and she wasn’t there. And I was like, ‘Ugh,’ maybe this is not the right Washington Mutual, or maybe I heard wrong, or something. So I had kind of decided to give up, that I’d never see this girl again.”
However, Mrs. Bowden had no such doubts.
“It was such fun never knowing when I’d see him, always hoping I would, and somehow, never being disappointed because I usually did…even in a city of 100,000 people!” she said.
They again met at a surf movie festival in Santa Barbara a few weeks later, where he finally invited her to a movie.
“I said to her, ‘Would you like to come to the movie across the street with us? It starts in like, an hour or something’. And so she said, ‘Sure, I just need to go home and change.’ So I guess I just sort of took that to mean that she’d never come back,” Mr. Bowden laughs.
She did come back and sat next to him during the movie.
“We talked and barely watched the movie because we were talking the whole time,” he said. “And people were shushing us.”
The two became friends—their relationship slowly progressed until Mrs. Bowden’s boss, who Mr. Bowden describes as something of a father-figure to Mrs. Bowden, became fed up with the turtle pace.
“She’s Armenian, and her boss is Armenian, so it was his Armenian duty to take her in. He was finally like, ‘Alright, who is this guy? He needs to take you on a proper date—none of this lunch and surfing.’ So he bought us tickets to the Harry Connick Jr. concert so we could go on a real date. We actually dressed up and went on a date, and that was the night that I held her hand for the first time.”
“Later I found out that her boss had ended up buying a third ticket for himself, and he sat five rows behind us to make sure I was a gentleman and treated her properly,” he laughs.
When Mr. Bowden confronted Mrs. Bowden’s boss later about crashing their date, he said, “Well, I promised her father I would watch after her, because she’s from San Francisco, and she was all the way in Santa Barbara and it was far from home— in the Armenian culture, Armenians look after each other.”
After that, the Bowdens became a couple—dating for three years before Mr. Bowden finally proposed. He sold his favorite surfboard to pay for the ring.
“I come from a traditional yet ‘Americanized’ Armenian family (first generation born here on my mom’s side and third generation on my dad’s),” Mrs. Bowden explained.
“I assumed it was expected that I marry an Armenian…but my parents surprised me as they accepted Ryan into the family. Our wedding was just like that movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding!” Ryan was so accepting of my cultural heritage. Now as we raise our beautiful boys together, he’s the one teaching them about the culture and making sure they know where they come from!”
Mrs. Bowden has advice for those in multicultural relationships.
“If you truly love and respect one another, you’ll see the cultural ‘differences’ as strengths. It will build a stronger, more meaningful relationship as it has for Ryan and [me]. I thank God everyday that our paths crossed that fateful evening in the Pacific!”
