Spencer Sleyon, a 22-year-old rapper and producer from East Harlem, and his friends were going around the room in October, talking about who their closest friends were.

When it was his turn, he said: “My best friend is an 81-year-old white woman who lives in a retirement community in Florida.”

To be clear, he was exaggerating. They weren’t quite best friends. But she was a friend, and the joke set off a chain of events that led to his flying to Palm Beach to actually meet Rosalind Guttman, the woman he had known only through the Words With Friends game on his phone.