Tell us the details of any odd things that happened to you. It must be true. Anyone have any good stories? Any interesting ones now then?
So do you want to know about things that happened now or things that happened then?
Odd things that happened to me in a well?
This just happened a couple of days ago., so it’s fresh in my mind I recently returned from Ethiopia, and I was telling a neighbor that I had become enamored with Ethiopian music. I explained that I had just discovered an Ethiopian singer, that I partly fell in love with because of her name. Names of flowers are often used for girls names in America, like Rose, Violet, Lily, but one lovely flower name is never used . . . . .
“Aster”, she interrupted. My jaw dropped, I asked how did she know (I was going to tell her about Aster Aweke). She said “It’s always been my favorite flower”.
There are only four people named Aster with Wikipedia bio articles. All four are Ethiopian women. Why is this beautiful name not used in our culture for girls? I told my neighbor that I wanted her to have my baby, so we could name her Aster. Luckily, she laughed.
Long story short (I do believe I’ve told the longer version here before).
My long time childhood friend moved away a few months previous. My long term childhood cherished pet cat had died a few weeks previous.
I have a bad night sleeping. At some point I think “hmmm, darn cat is on my legs again, how can I move…wait the cat is fucking dead!..sure as hell feels like something on my legs…oh shit, its those damn giant rats we keep killing in the attic…”
Much terror and contemplation for awhile…I am now wide assed awake…sure feels like something down there.
After a seeming eternity I make a move…throwing the covers off…leaping up and turning on the lights.
Dang…nothing there…WTF?
A few days get call from childhood friend. He was sleeping, had the cat (his cat) on the bed thing too, except when HE move the cat it attacked him.
But it wasn’t his/their cat.
It was an escaped ferret that found the way into their house and his bed.
Further discussion revealed these two things happened at about the same time on the same night.
Coincidence or something more?
You decide.
One day I’m out walking a route I have walked a hundred times before. For no reason whatsoever, I suddenly go down a street I have never walked before.
And find a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk.
Several years ago on my way to work I decided to stop for breakfast, which I rarely did. Bought a newspaper to peruse. I was living in Laramie, Wyoming but bought the Denver paper, which I rarely looked at.
I decided to check out the obituaries, which I never do.
The first obituary I looked at was of a man that I had known in Rock Springs, Wyoming several years ago.
A chance meeting: I worked for a young Ensign at my duty station in 1986. I left there and went to four years of duty with the State Department, then retired and worked for a contractor in Europe for a couple of years, and then was hired directly by the Department of State.
I was in WDC for training in 1992 and was in Alexandria, VA at some big celebration. Tens of thousands of people there, and I glance to my right and there’s my former boss looking back at me. I don’t know which of us was more shocked. It crossed my mind that perhaps he was with some government investigative service and was following me, as there are very few coincidences in life.
Went to meet a girl for a second date and she shows up with a cane:smack:
One of the most shocking moments of my life. Especially when she didn’t have a cane on the first date.
A couple of stories. 52 years ago I was on my honeymoon trip to England and France. Walking down the street in Arles, in the south of France, someone stopped and said he had been in my calculus class the previous term. He had flunked.
But here is the really improbable one. In 1993, I think it was, my wife, college age son, and I were visiting the Japanese garden inside the botanical gardens in Seattle. My son, who was a student at Northwestern, happened to be wearing a McGill blazer (I have no idea why). A man came up to him and asked if were a student at McGill. No, he said, but his father is a professor there. So the man asked if he could speak to me. He told me his son was a student at McGill. That narrows it down to 1 in 25,000 people. Oh, I said, unimpressed. A graduate student, he added. What department I asked more to pass the time, than for any real interest. Math. dept, he said. Oh, that’s my department, what is your son’s name. He told me. His son was my PhD student.
The man didn’t live in Seattle, he was going from Anchorage where to San Antonio where he lived and stopped to visit his daughter. I was there to visit my older son. So we had to be in Seattle, where neither of us lives, at the same time; we had to both decide to visit the Japanese garden there; my son had to decide to wear a McGill blazer.
Met a guy who has a penchant for ending all of his sentences with “then”.
Very strange indeed.
I graduated high school in Houston in 1966. Fast forward to 1980. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Sari Pacific hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. In walk the parents of one of my best friends in high school. They used to say that they were going to claim me as a dependent on their tax return because I spent so much time at his house.
They had just retired and were doing an around-the-world thing.
What kind of cane? like a walking stick, or the type blind people use? or the kind they discipline you with in Victorian boarding schools?
I was in a state park with a guy once, in Indiana, where a lot of state park area is old homesteads, so there are some family cemeteries, and there are even a couple where the family retained rights to continue to use the cemetery until it was full, or until a certain date, or something. So we stopped to look at this one little cemetery-- some of them have really old stones, and occasionally even amateur-carved ones, anyway-- there was one that had what was clearly a fresh grave, but the stone indicated that the person buried there had died ten years earlier. We made all the usual zombie and vampire jokes, until a real possibility occurred to us. There was a guy up in Northern Indiana named Orville Lynn Majors, who was a nurse accused of “helping” several patients to check-out early, so to speak. There had been a number of exhumations of people who had died in a 15-5 years ago window, most in Northern Indiana, and we were South of Indianapolis, albeit, not that far South-- it was conceivable someone who died in Northern IN, who was entitled to a free plot because she was descended from this family, would have taken advantage of it, because plots are expensive enough that embalming the body and transporting it could have been cheaper than buying a local plot.
Of course, there were more mundane possibilities. Someone may have moved grandma because she could afford to do so, and hadn’t been able to afford to transport the body when grandma had originally died, or maybe grandma had been buried in a double plot she was supposed to share with grandpa, and then 10 years down the road, grandpa remarried, so the family decided to move grandma to the family cemetery.
But the fact is, I saw a fresh grave of a person who was 10 years dead, whatever the reason.
I was doing some work at the embassy in Paris with a colleague, and we decided to take a walk down the Champs. He was wearing one of those goofy driving caps, and complained to me that nobody in France wore hats like he had.
I commented that “Well, it’s probably because it looks stupid.” And he replies, “Yeah, well if you think I look stupid, look at that moron who thinks he’s Elton John.”
So I looked. It was indeed Elton John, as verified by the gaggle of photographers who rounded the corner right behind him.
Years ago, I was in Seattle for a business trip, and met up with an aunt and her husband that I hardly ever see, and their kids (my cousins, but much older than me) and grandkids. My aunt was a very nice, proper lady, all about propriety. She was telling me about their trip to Hawaii, and had to pass along a message as she’d promised to the nice couple who’d rented the condo next door.
This was a bit confusing, since I didn’t know anyone who’d been to Hawaii, and my aunt couldn’t remember the couple’s names. But they’d insisted that her nephews (me & my brother) would know them, and that I should say high next time I saw them.
So, we went through a lot of questions: what did they look like, where would we have met them, what did they do? Ice cream. She thought. Or maybe something like ice cream… Frozen custard, maybe? Did she meet Ted and Dottie Drewe?!?!
That was the name! And, sure enough, next time I was at Ted Drewe’s and saw him hanging around in back, my friends goaded me into saying “Hi”. He did indeed remember my aunt and uncle from Hawaii, we had a chuckle and a nice chat, and I walked away with my concrete comped.
Well, he’s not wrong about the moron who thinks he’s Elton John looking stupid, even if the moron isn’t mistaken about being Elton John, is he?
Mus t have been one *hell *of a first date.
Once upon a time, I was sitting on my couch writing. I had a glass of tea sitting on the coffee table. I stopped writing, placed my pen on the cushion to my left, took a drink of tea and then reached to pick up the pen. It wasn’t there. I looked on the floor in front of the couch and it wasn’t there. I felt around the cushion but no pen. I got down on the floor and looked under the couch. Nope. I pulled the couch out from the wall and looked all around. I took the cushions off the couch and laid them on the floor and checked the whole couch. Still no pen. I refused to believe the pen had just disappeared so I crawled around on the floor in the entire room to look for it, even though the idea that it had propelled itself across the room was also unbelievable. No pen. I finally gave up. I pushed the couch back, put the cushions back on and sat down. I picked up the glass of tea, took a drink, looked at the cushion to my left and the pen was there. I do not know what the fuck. Strangest thing that ever happened to me.
Oh, so many. Been a while since I’ve had any really good ones, though.
What prompted you to ask?