One legendary game of Apples-to-Apples, my brother and I both got “make your own” cards. I don’t know how they’re supposed to be used, but house rule is that they stay blank and whoever picks can make it anything they want.
The green apple card was “Weird”.
Brother and I said, “Michael Jackson!”.
We laughed about picking the same person, and tried again.
This time we both mentioned a certain person we know.
Third time we finally came up with different people (IIRC, one of them was me) and got on wth the game.
Two very odd coincidences for me:
- I have a pretty uncommon last name - when I was growing up in Yuba City, California (the whole area had around 75k people spread over a few towns when I was growing up), the only other non-related family in the whole area who shared our name just happened to live down the block from my grandpa in Marysville, the next town over.
Anyway, when I was in 8th grade, I moved from Yuba City up to Douglas City, in Trinity county. Yuba City isn’t a large town, and Douglas City is absolutely tiny. One of the girls in my class had the same last name as I, and it turns out she was one of the kids who used to live down the street from my grandfather.
- After I got out of the Navy, I moved to Tacoma WA and lived with my brother for a spell, working at a Target. One day, just after I started, I’m chatting with one of my co-workers, and he mentions that he grew up in Yuba City, to which I replied “so did I!”. And it dawns on both of us that this guy and I were friends in elementary school.
Back when a wee lass in California, 6 years old, my brother and I used to love to peak over the tall fence to look at our neighbor’s pool. We would have to climb up and hang on the fence to look, but, it was attractive enough for the effort to do so. Go figger kid’s minds.
Mom gave us a wishbone from a chicken cooked,with the good story of Make A Wish while two kids tugging, and Bro and I did. My wish was to have the fence fall down so I could see the pool next door more easy. I got the big end of the wishbone, so won. The next day, a storm came up and blew down a good section of the fence, and, the pool was in easy view.
This scared the living shit out of me at that age, and I was terrified to tell anyone about my wish, as it messed up the fence. What are the odds? I’ve never had anything that blatantly coincidental since, just some meager ones.
THREE DIFFERENT STORIES
In the late '70’s I was playing banjo full-time for a bluegrass band based in Chicago. We played a lot in Wisconsin, clubs, colleges, weddings, etc. We traveled in an old 1963 Ford schoolbus with the band name on the back, and we broke down a lot. Stopped by the side of the road in rural Wisconsin, a couple drives by, stops, and comes back around.
Yup, a bride and groom we played for a few months previous.
My family history included the story of my father having a daughter 10 years before he married my mother and had me. So, I knew I had a half-sister out in the universe. Never investigated who she was.
Last August, SHE FOUND ME !!
She had been adopted, and always wanted to find her birth parents. In June, she found her mother, and her mother’s 2 daughters. Found my father’s name in her birth mother’s address book, found my father’s obituary, it had my name listed, Googled me and found me through the music school I teach at.
She e-mailed me, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since. We really LIKE each other.
PLUS, she was living in Kansas in 1979, and used to go to a big music festival in the town she lived in. Knew the local guitar builder, and her then husband worked at the guitar factory.
GUESS WHERE MY BAND PLAYED IN 1979?
GUESS WHICH GUITAR BUILDER I HUNG WITH WHEN I WAS THERE?
She and her 4 kids danced to my music 30 years before we knew we were brother and sister.
Recent story. Met a woman through a personal ad in 2004, and we’ve been together ever since. The first couple of months talking through our histories, we find out:
She used to live a block from the music school I was studying at and have been teaching at for 14 years.
The kid who lived next door to her and was her 1st baby sitter when she was raising her kids became my student at the music school.
One of the neighborhood women who helped her with child rearing used to sing with me in a chorus in the '80’s.
Another folk singer who used to perform at their neighborhood festivals runs the music store I used to teach at.
My whole life seems to be filled with coincidence.
David
I came into reunion with the daughter I had surrendered to adoption as a teenager, when she was 28 yrs old.
There were several commonalities that struck us both as more than chance, but then, we were enamored of such things, so I don’t think they really count, for this thread.
Imagine my surprise to learn she had attended the same university as I, and taken the same degree. In the town where I live, but she does not. It kind of blew us both out of the water when we realized.
In fact her parents were opposed to her coming here and taking this degree, by the by. (And not because they knew the slightest thing about me, they just wanted her to attend a university closer to their home. Also, she was not, as a rule, a child inclined to go against their wishes, either.)
Just one of many for me: a friend who lived out of town needed a U of Florida graduate catalogue and asked me to pick one up. Well, with me being the Crown Prince of Procrastinators, Friday rolled around (I often drove back to my home town on weekends where she lived) and dontcha know I hadn’t gotten around to getting it yet. I was walking back to my car, the sky was starting to look very dark, and what do I spy on the trunk of the car directly ahead? Yep. Not wanting it to let it get soaked (which wouldn’t have done the original owner any good-they were free BTW), I let discretion be the better part of valor and lifted it away.
I was in Massachusetts and was chatting with a girl who said she was from Wilmington, Delaware. So I said, Oh, you must know so-and-so (somebody else I knew who happened to be from Wilmington). She did.
But four people I used to work with have a much better one. Each of the four, all Americans, happened to rent the same bedroom of the same house in Geneva, Switzerland at different times before they met one another working here in the US.
Back in my hitch-hiking days, I was given a ride in Alabama by a guy who no more that 10 minutes later stopped to pick up another hitch-hiker. Both hitch-hikers turned out to have known each other from the chess club in junior high school in Massachusetts.
One afternoon I received a phone call on my cell phone from someone asking for mrs.kidneyfailure. I tell the caller that she called MKF’s husband and that she should call my wife back on her cell phone. Caller gets confused, “I didn’t know that XXX was married!” “Yeah, we’ve been married four years.” “What? Really? Why didn’t she invite me to the wedding?” “I don’t know. Call her on her phone.” “Ok, I will. BTW, when will she get back from her business trip to Japan?” “She’s already back. Came back yesterday.” I give her MKF’s number and hang up. Shortly thereafter, I get a call from MKF who tells me that the person who called her was a total stranger looking for someone else of the exact same name (MKF has a very unusual name) who also had gone on a business trip to Japan. Weird.
Except for two transposed digits, the PIN of my ATM card happens to be the same as the building access code at my workplace. How strange…
In Korea, we have dreams we call “birth dreams,” which are supposed to happen around the beginning of a pregnancy. The dream isn’t dreamt by the woman herself, but by someone she knows. Animals mean the child is a boy, objects mean it’s a girl.
So one night I have this dream about a teacher (who was also a friend of the family) I had years and years ago, at the Korean school I used to attend on Saturdays back in Atlanta. Mind you, I hadn’t thought about this teacher in forever, so the dream was seriously random. In the dream, I was in a hotel, and I ran into my old teacher. I reached into my pocket and gave her a key, which she took, and then left.
A month or so later, my mom tells me she just got a call from said teacher, with the news that she just found out she was pregnant.
It turned out to be a girl.
I don’t believe in these things, but at the time I felt a little silly, like I’d accidentally impregnated her or something.
In the late 70’s My first roommate when I moved into the dorms turned out to live literally around the corner a few doors away from my home residence in Bethesda, MD. This was at the University of MD College Park a big college with an approx 30,000 - 40,000 person student body with a lot of out of in and out of state students and thousands of students in the dorms.
The charm wore off quickly when he started disassembling his VW engine in the middle of the room, taking lots of drugs, and asking me to sleep in the lounge so he could bang random skanks in the room.
A couple of years ago, I got a new debit card, and I decided to actually make an effort to learn the PIN. I decided to see how the PIN matched up with letters on the telephone dial, hoping it would spell something out so I could remember it.
It was the first 4 letters of my last name.
I still to this day hope that this was just a coincidence and that the bank wasn’t doing this on purpose. It seems like a security risk that they would make a PIN out of 4 letters that are printed on the card.
Last October, my family and I took a nice week-long vacation in Orlando, FL.
My sister completely independently scheduled her family’s vacation the exact same week as us, and also booked a condo about a mile down the road from where we were.
We found out about it about a month before the trip, so it was a nice surprise.
My kids and her kids had a great time at Disney together. Everyone agreed that it was the best vacation ever.
In 2002, my wife and I flew to Fort Lauderdale, rented a car and drove around southeast Florida, including a trip to Key West. We ended up back in Lauderdale with about a day and a half left before our return flight, so, on a whim, we decided to drive across the state to Naples. As we drove west on the Tamiami Trail, I saw the entrance to the Shark Valley portion of Everglades National Park. I had had some snake and alligator adventures there many years before, and pulled in to show my wife the place. We parked and noticed a small group of people inside a large shelter building near the parking area, all looking up at the rafters. Inside, we found that there was a red-tailed hawk in the rafters, and one guy had a professional looking camera on a tripod and was taking shots of the hawk. We chatted with him for a while and then left for Naples.
In 2005, we went on a cruise that included a trip through the three Atlantic locks of the Panama Canal. We hadn’t planned any shore excursion in Panama, but at the last minute signed up for a bus trip into the jungle to try to see some wildlife. At our first stop in the jungle, we all got out to look at a sloth. When we got back on the bus, there was one passenger still outside, taking pictures of the sloth. He looked vaguely familiar. As he made his way back to his seat, right behind us, I became pretty sure it was him, the guy from Shark Valley, and sure enough it was.
I had an incredibly vivid dream one time where I was on a small fishing boat and we were hit by a storm and there was “Biblical” narration going on the whole time, Old Testament style “And lo…” and "Thou shalt"s and the like. The Book of Acts was mentioned too so when I woke up I grabbed a bible, opened it to Acts and although the story was new to me I read an accurate account of what had happened in my dream.
My wife and I have identical last four digits of our Social Security numbers.
A few years after graduating college in Texas I was in Alaska and one weekend decided to drive over to Hope, an old gold mining district that’s pretty remote and gets scant traffic. Driving along a river outside town in my Jeep I see an old sourdough and… hey… that other guy looks familiar. I get out and ask Steve what in the world he’s doing here. Steve was in my department back in Texas and here we’d run into each other in remore Alaska 4500 miles away. A year or so later I’m pulling up to a rig on some remote oilfield back in Texas, look over and there’s Steve again, a geologist on the rig. A year or so after that I’m back in Alaska, have to get the Scanning Electron Microscope reports on some samples in an obscure Anchore facility, enter the lab and who’s writing the reports? Yep, Steve.
Crotalus reminds me… My first trip to Alaska I go down to Homer and walk the halibut charters on the Spit boardwalk and I see this one fisherman in particular, a burly lookin’ character that’s whipping this filet knife around making short work of a 150 lb halibut. I mean this guy looks the part of a no nonsense captain, so I take his picture and move on.
A year later I’m back in Alaska on another trip and at the end of the summer decide to hitchhike around the state for a couple of weeks before returning home. So I’m all the way over I think by Tok or Teslin Junction, sitting on the side of the road and it’s the lonliest stretch of pavement you’ve ever seen. Maybe a car or two an hour, which of course gets me to thinkin’ about bears. Then it starts to rain. Beauty. I see an old pick-up crawling down the road and the guy stops to let me in. Big burly guy, we start talking, he can’t take me but 8 miles as he’s gotta turn off but at least that’ll get me to the one hotel in the whole area and all of a sudden I realize who this is. You have a charter boat in Homer, don’t you? He looks at me funny, we shake hands and I’ve now met Tony DiMichelle.
So a year or so later and I’m on yet another trip up there, stop at a bar on the Kenai, look over down the rail, see this gruff lookin’ bearded dude and I tell the bartender to buy that guy a beer for me. I mean he had after all given me a ride one rain soaked night out in the middle of nowhere. Three trips over three years and I run into the same stranger each time.
ETA: Hmmm… even found a pic.
In 2001 we moved to the UK, and registered at the local doctors surgery. In the UK (unlike in NZ) you had to register at the closest clinic, and they assigned you to a doctor. We were told we would be assigned to a NZ doctor, which we thought was nice. Before long, my wife had to make an appointment, and walked in to the doctors room. And recognised her.
We had travelled half way round the world to be randomly assigned to a doctor who used to live in the same city as us in NZ and who had employed my mother-in-law.
Si
Sept 10 2001
I was looking on the FBI most wanted list. I noticed Bin Laden, I proceed to read about him on wikipedia. Ok great. Good Night!
The very next morning was history. I’ll never forget that chill in my spine.
In 1977 my family moved to Lexington, KY, a city of about 200,000 at that time. I was in 6th grade, my brother in 3d. About a month after we’d gotten there the family went to a movie and then to Baskin-Robbins for an ice-cream.
My Dad is an outgoing fellow and will talk to anyone. As is his wont, he started talking to the guy behind the counter at the BR. In the course of the conversation it came out that we had just moved to town. After a little more discussion, it turns out we had just moved into the house this guy had grown up in.