My father and I had a layover in Hong Kong, and decided to go outside in the crushing humidity to do some morning shopping. The streets were packed in the commuter rush, I guess, and we ended up walking (or pushing) against the dominant traffic flow. Suddenly, from the mass of humanity, an arm shoots up above hundreds of heads. We hear a voice distinctly shout my father’s name, and before we can even catch a glimpse of who it might be the person was gone, swept away by the flow of humanity. We never saw who the person was. Afterwards we actually had to pause and collect ourselves; halfway around the world, on one of the most crowded streets I’ve ever been on, someone recognized and greeted my father. Creepy.
When I decided what college I was going to attend, I found out that my father had treated one of the trustee’s wives (dad’s a physician). I took that as a good sign. Then we met the Episcopalian minister who’d baptised me as a child; he asked where I was attending college and he nearly fell over. It was the same small, remote, liberal arts school he’d attended. I then knew that I was making the right decision.
A few years ago my mom gave me a gift certificate to a local garden shop for my birthday. A few days after my birthday I came home from work and the phone was ringing, so I picked it up and went outside to talk. It was my mom and she was telling me that at that garden shop I had the gift certificate for a guy who specializes in rescuing plants from sites slated for development was going to be there and selling Lady’s Slippers - we would always look for these in the woods when I was younger. I told my mom I would go and check it out, and maybe buy a Lady’s Slipper with my birthday gift certificate. We chatted a few more minutes then I went back indoors to hang the phone up and change out of my work clothes…and there on my dining table was a small potted plant…could it be…YES! It was a Showy Lady’s Slipper! I was really weirded out, how did it get there, and why didn’t I see it the first time I went into the house?
Turns out that a friend of my boyfriend had dropped it off for me, and I must have overlooked it when I walked in and picked up the phone. It is strange because I had never mentioned to this person that I was interested in Lady’s Slippers, and I had just been talking to my mom about the exact same plant.
I was at a conference in a hotel in Paris, and I heard a page for delphica to pick up an urgent phone message at the front desk. At about the same time, there was also a page for Mr. Complete Stranger to pick up an urgent phone message at the front desk. Since Mr. Complete Stranger was … well … a complete stranger, I didn’t really pay attention and just hoofed it over the front desk to get my phone message.
When I got the desk, the clerk was standing there holding a message, which I took and opened. It simply said “Call Mary Unusual Surname at Large, Well-Known Corporation ASAP.” Mary is my best friend’s sister, who works at a large, well-known corporation, and I was nervous because there would be no reason for her to call me while I was on a business trip unless there was something wrong. I left her several messages but I couldn’t get in touch with her.
A bit later, I’m paged to come to the front desk again. Mr. Complete Stranger is there, and he explains that he picked up my message by mistake, and I picked up his message. It turns out that Mr. Complete Stranger is also staying at the hotel (although not attending the same conference) and works for the same company as Mary. When I finally talked to Mary later, she was amazed that I picked up her message because she didn’t even know I was in Paris.
This story would be better if Mr. Complete Stranger also knew the person who had phoned for me, but alas, it was only my boss and they didn’t know each other.
We used to get farm-fresh eggs delivered to our house when I was a kid. It wasn’t unusal to get double-yolked eggs, and when you’re 5 years old, it’s a pretty damn neat thing to see. (Hey! I had a boring childhood.)
The farmer who delivered these eggs is long since retired and likely deceased, and mom and dad buy their eggs at the grocery store. A double-yolked egg is almost never heard of in grocery store dozens.
I was at mom and dad’s for a visit a year or so ago and was making pancakes for breakfast (mmm… pancakes) and while I was breaking the egg, I mentioned to mom and dad how I remembered the egg man and those double yolked eggs. I pulled the shell halves apart at that very moment to reveal… a double-yolked egg! I haven’t seen one since.
Internet-related coincidences are my specialty.
A few years ago, I was at a Tori Amos show in Cleveland (I live in Kentucky, about 6.5 hours away.) My friend and I were seated next to a guy that was by himself, so I started talking to him. We exchanged emails, and became fairly good friends for a bit. He had told me a few times about this girl he had a crush on, blah blah blah, and when he shows me her picture, I knew I’d seen it before. I went to the site for a very close mailing list I’m on, for fans of They Might Be Giants, and there was her picture.
A few years before that… My boyfriend-at-the-time (let’s call him SB, for Souless Bastard) and I drove to Washington DC, from Kentucky, to see Tori Amos. We stayed with a friend of his he knew from a mailing list (named Nikki.) I didn’t know her, but she seemed very nice. Since this was a general admission show, we spent quite a bit of time in line, and during that time I started talking to the guy behind us in line, named Ivan. I learned he was an electrical engineering grad student at a big nearby university, from Russia originally, etc. He had an extra ticket he bought for a girl, who turned out to already have one of her own. We had fun talking, but when they opened the door to the venue, we lost track of him. We took some good seats on the balcony, and started talking to a few people around us. One of the girls was an Electrical Engineering grad student at the same large university. Later, I found out the extra ticket Ivan had was originally intended for her (he had a bit of a crush on her at the time.) Ivan and I stay and touch, SB breaks up with me the next day, and a few months later I start working at a new company, with SB’s next door neighbor (named Shane, also a huge Tori Amos fan). The newer boyfriend has some friends online from various mailing lists, that he went to a few Tori Amos shows with. Fast forward to late November… As a last hurrah, Ivan and I decide to meet in Akron to see another Tori Amos show. He says he’s going to bring along some other friends, and mentions one in particular… Penelope. She was one of Shane’s good friends that he knew from online. By this point I’d developed a huge crush on Ivan, but he went for Penelope instead (and they dated for something close to three years.)
THEN… last year sometime I got an email from the girl that we’d stayed with in DC, Nikki. She had been browsing some links of a friend she knew from a Kids in the Hall newsgroup, and had found a link to my website. I knew the girl that had the link from the same forementioned They Might Be Giants mailing list. To wind this story down to an end, I’m friends with Nikki and Ivan (I saw them in March), Shane is married to someone that despises Tori Amos, and the Souless Bastard is still… well, the Souless Bastard. But the fact that so many of these internet circles overlapped the way they did… while not the most exciting thing in the world, certainly intrigues me.
Speaking of double-yolked eggs: a couple months ago, I bought some green eggs from the local health-food store to make some pies with (green eggs=normal eggs with green shells). Of the dozen in the carton, something like seven or eight were double-yolked. I’d never seen anything like it. Are there breeds of chickens that are prone to double-yolked eggs?
Daniel
In my college days, I met the man that would eventually become my husband. It’s interesting that we have some strage overlaps in our separate histories. These weren’t discovered until we’d been dating for quite a while.
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He and my brother had the same teachers in the fifth and sixth grades.
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In grade school, my best friend and his best friend were brothers.
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In high school, my best friend and his best friend were sisters.
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His mother and my father lived in the same apartment complex after they divorced their spouses.
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We share exact memories of our childhood in terms of location and participants. “Do you remember the time when…”
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He and I went to the same high school and had many of the same teachers.
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His sister and my brother went to outdoor school together.
I find it amazing that it took us 20 years to actually meet each other with all of the commonalities that we share. Maybe this isn’t coincidence afterall.
I posted the earlier story about my brother bumping into me in the middle of NYC…
I forgot about a more recent, scary story…
Don’t know if this is coincidence, or fate (a difference?) but here goes:
My friends B and T go to a local bar in Manhattan every once in awhile and have a lot of aquantences there. One guy who hung out there, M, was unemployed and looking for a job.
He had been looking for a long time, so when he finally got an interview, he told B and T and he was pretty excited about it.
As a matter of fact, he had to leave the bar early that night to get up for his 9:00 am interview - on the 100th something floor of the World Trade Center, tomorrow, 9/11/01.
No one heard from M the next day, or the next, or the next…everyone assumed the worst and felt real bad because nobody knew his last name to call and find out any info.
Two weeks later, in walks M!
That night, 9/10/01 he had gone home early to get to bed early for the interview and in the middle of the night, he had a gall bladder attack and had to be rushed to the hospital.
He wasn’t able to make it to the interview.
I swear the above is a true story, as B and I talked a lot on the phone that week and she was always concerned about what happened to M.
{This is one of my favorite threads}
My FIL is handicapped. Paralyzed from the nipples down. He drives a Ford Econoline 250 that is handicapped equipped. The man, until he was in the accident that left him paralized, never had an accident. To date, since 1991, he has been in four major accidents, none of them have been his fault. Three of them in this van. (Which we bought off him- it was an outstanding vehicle - that it took ME one well done near head on collision to total it out.)
His uncle in law, Irving, (who is only a few years older than him) was visiting with his wife, Lizabet, from Germany. (Lizabet is my MIL’s aunt, who is only five years older than her neice.)
Anywhooo, FIL and Uncle Irving were sitting at a red light at a busy intersection in the Econoline when *WHAM! ** they were rear ended by a kid not paying attention and hit them at 40 mph. They were fine, the van needed very minor work, the kid had a concussion ( lack of seat belt.)
Two years later, at the same intersection, with a passenger named Irving * (different guy, who is now living with Lizabeth as her husband, Irving the First, as we call him, has died of cancer. )sitting at a red light, **WHAM! ** another rear end by someone not paying attention. (This time FIL had a broken rib, concussion and some cuts.)
So the moral of this story is do not ever drive at intersection X with my father in law if your name is Irving.
I have a good one for you. Basically a while ago I was bored at work (as usual) and started googling on my name and then my friend’s names, etc. When I googled on my boyfriend’s name (let’s call him Luther Blissett) I found another guy with exactly the same name (no coincidence), same job (getting warmer) and exact same work environment (red-brick provincial university). So, this was a little bit spooky. When I got home that evening I said to him, ‘hey, I googled on your name and I found another Luther Blissett with the same job as you’ and he replied ‘that’s odd, I did exactly the same thing today and found the same guy.’
Apropos of not much, I love that Mulder quote from the X-Files when it was good: ‘If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they seem so contrived?’
When I was just a kid, I worked at a rental yard one summer. A guy came in with an unusual car -a Sunbeam Tiger- which had a broken gas pedal. He asked if anyone at the yard could weld. Although we didn’t usually do repairs, we felt sorry for the guy, so I crawled down into the footwell and welded the pedal back together.
Tigers have been my Dream Car ever since.
Fifteen years later, one of my friends who’s into English cars bought a Sunbeam Tiger. Just out of curiosity, I poked my head under the dash and looked at the gas pedal. It was the same car…
I’ve got two…
When I was in college, I knew two guys with the same unusual name. When I asked if they knew that there was another on campus with the same name they were surprised. After I got the two of them together, the compared notes and discovered they were distant cousins with a common ancestor after which they were both named.
The other is my my wife and I. We both grew up in Pennsylvania, although half a state apart. When I was in college in Alabama, her uncle was my history professor. When I later moved to Kansas with my first wife, she would frequently visit a near neighbor and walk his dog past my house (although she was a teen at the time).
Later I left Wichita and returned a year-and-a-half later. During my post-divorce years, she would frequently visit friends who lived in my apartment complex.
During this whole time, we never met until we were fixed up as a blind date.
Great thread. I thought I might as well ressurect it with this story.
Some of my family is way into geneology and family history. Both sides of my family originated in England. While researching some of the historical writings, it was discovered that both lines of ancestry came accross to America on the same ship.
The tip-off came from accounts of a woman who’s child had died during the voyage and had been buried at sea. The woman had to be tied to a bed for the duration of the trip to keep her from jumping overboard. I have forgotten many of the other details but the same story was recorded within the histories of both sides of the family.
I forget the number of years which passed before my mother and father were united but it was considerable.
Small world eh?
The middle part of John Lennon’s first and last names (OH ENNO) reads like someone spelling his adopted middle name (Ono).
About 20 years ago, I started having dreams about a girl I went to camp with at around age 11. These dreams went on for a few weeks. One day, I was waiting to cross the street and a big moving or hauling truck with her last name in huge letters drives past me. I thought that was a coincidence. About a week after that, a friend of mine happens to mention the full name of a new law-school friend of hers. Yes, same name. I figured the age was right and, for the heck of it, described my camp friend to her. She said by my description of age, hair color, build, etc (mind you, I was describing an 11-year-old) that it wasn’t out of the question. During her next class she mentioned my name to her new friend. It was the same girl.
Great thread!
Last weekend, I went to a used record store to look for 10,000 Maniacs’ “In My Tribe” on vinyl. They didn’t have it.
On Tuesday, I noticed a box by the trash can in my apartment building’s parking lot. Inside were a bunch of records, including “In My Tribe.”