Last week I was in Princeton for dinner and thought about a boss (Lisa) I had 23 years ago who was a P-ton alum. I hadn’t thought about her in years and chatted with my dinner companions about her, wondering where she ended up.
This morning, on the way to work, I was listening absent-mindedly to NPR when a voice I knew shocked me into alertness: it was Lisa! It was Lisa commenting as an Obama-appointed Dept of Ed official to a reporter . . . I had to pull off on the shoulder, as I was too astounded to pay attention to the road. :eek:
Many years back, my son was getting some belt (orange, I think) in his martial arts class, so the family took him out to celebrate at a restaurant on the block. I forgot my purse in the car and went back to get it and, out on the sidewalk, I ran into - and I mean that literally - his uncle on his father’s side, who I hadn’t seen in 10 years! Even stranger he (the uncle) had moved about 70 miles since I’d seen him last, and was now living in the apartment above my son’s dojo! We’d been going there weekly for two years and never run into him, and I haven’t seen him since.
The morning I started a brand new job, my boss introduced me to the woman I’d be sharing an office with. It was the friend of my high-school girlfriend, who I hadn’t seen (or thought about, frankly) in more than a decade. The conversation went something like this.
She: Oh my God, I know you!
Me: Oh my God, I know you!
She: I remember you from high school.
Me: You were Mary’s friend.
She: I didn’t like you.
Me: I didn’t like you, either.
When I worked for the bank, the little brother of the guy I lost my virginity to came in. Last time I saw him, he was a scrawny 7th grader… now he’s all grown up and kinda foxy. Anyway, we got to chatting. His brother (my ex) was getting married, etc. The next day, my ex looked me up on facebook and I had a friend request from him…
I have a half brother whom I haven’t heard from or seen since I was about four years old. He’s about ten years older than I am, and the last place we saw each other was in Alvin, TX.
I’ve since moved all over the US. Well, about seven years ago, I moved to Bend, Oregon- population about 70k, and about two thousand miles from where I grew up. I lived there about four years, and then moved up to Seattle. I’d been living in Seattle for about two months, when I got an email from my brother. He’d been Googling the family name and found my professional website.
He lives in Bend, Oregon. For about four years, we lived in the same small town halfway across the country from the last place we saw each other.
Well, I’ve since moved all the way across the country. I now live in a ridiculously small town in Baltimore- so small, in fact, that I can’t even find out how many people live here.
The kicker? His wife’s sister lives here, just a few miles from me, and he’s coming to visit sometime this summer.
When I was young, we didn’t have a lot of money, but we scrimped and saved on a couple of family trips. On our first big trip ever, we transfered airplanes, and my mom was shocked to run into a guy she went to high school with. He was on his way to Iraq (this was the first Iraq war.)
Years later we went on our second big trip. We ran into him again, this time on his way home.
My good friend from high school in California recently finished nurses training in New York. She found a job in Seattle. Imagine her surprise when on her first day in this new city she randomly runs into my first high school boyfriend!
A couple months ago, I was going to a concert in Philadelphia with my family (I moved away from this area last year, but I was back for a visit) and I ran into a friend from elementary school in the parking lot. He wasn’t going to the concert; he was walking home from class or something. We’re Facebook friends (which is how we each knew what the other one looks like now), but hadn’t seen each other in real life in twelve years.
I once ran into someone I’d known from upstate New York while we were in the middle of Times Square in NYC.
She was living in Washington, D.C., and I was then in Utah, back for a visit. What are the odds? Even if we’d known that we were both in the city, and would be in Times Square at the same time, we most likely would’ve missed each other.
I started dating this guy, and he played me a clip of his friend’s girlfriend’s band. I sort of liked it, and the band was playing a couple of days after my birthday, so my roommate and I went to see her band (the guy didn’t go with us, he has a weird schedule).
So I’m hanging out outside in my Ben Folds Five t-shirt and this girl bounces up to me and starts talking BFF. She mentions how the lead singer of the band (dude’s friend’s girlfriend) and her are big BFF fans and they have seen them all over the country and were really involved in the BFF community and I should talk to her.
I talk to her and it turns out that she and I know each other from the BFF mailing list, and we’d been to all of the same shows, and we’d even traded tapes. She recognized my name and once I thought about it, I recognized hers. She also knew some of my other BFF friends.
Also at the show I ran into a kid I’d gone to college with, 10 years earlier. It was a really weird night, because I rarely ever go out. I go out once and run into all these people I know - and they know this random dude I’d just started seeing!
Oh, it wasn’t that bad. Ten years had smoothed out some of the more obnoxious parts we both had in high school. We didn’t become best buddies, but we managed to work together wiothout any great problems.
I had an experience like that just this past weekend.
I was invited to a Memorial Day party at the family of my magic student. While I was there talking to magic student’s mom, a woman pops her head in and says something to her really quick, then looks at me and says, “Hi Dragwyr”. I have no idea who this woman is, so I ask her how we know each other and she says, “Its me… Betsy.” Then it hit me. I went to HS with this girl. It turned out she has been good friends with my magic student’s mother for years. I had not seen her in over 20 years.
I once dated a professor of astronomy from Cal Tech, about 1982. We broke it off after several dates.
Then, a couple of years ago, I was watching a TV show about astronomy, and there he was lecturing about dark matter and the big bang theory! How strange it was to see him on television. And he hadn’t aged a bit, either.
My first “date” (at least I like to think of it as that, it wasn’t… really, more like a fun trip together) was with a girl when I was in 7th grade. I took her to see what was called the “Rock Superbowl” in Orlando, around 1981, I think. She and I went all the way through school together but I really only hung out with her socially, not as a relationship. I DID have a terrible crush on her!
Many years later, after being married a few years, I was up in the middle of the night, sick, and happened to turn on ESPN. The Goodwill Games were going on, and they were showing women’s bicycle racing, going through the streets of Moscow. When they showed the leaders, HOLY CRAP! there she was, in second place, I think, at the time. There was NO mistaking her name, there could only be one person with her name in the whole world, and sure enough it was her.
That was cool. But even better, a couple years later, I’m sitting on the couch watching tv, when on comes a shampoo commercial, and there she is again, the “hot babe” with the shimmering hair and the radiant locks. I didn’t even say anything to my wife about it at the time, but I told every damn one of my friends the next day.
If you’re real good with your Google-Fu, you can probably figure out who she is.
I’ve had a couple instances of discovering that someone from my past knows someone from my present, but that’s becoming reasonably common in the age of Facebook. However, the one that threw me was discovering that the house my Mom & I bought when we moved to Indiana in 1984 - the couple who we bought it from are the parents of one of my current coworkers. The part that makes me feel old? Either she hadn’t yet been conceived or her mother was newly pregnant with her at the time. sigh
I was up in suburban Maryland trying to find a place where I was to meet a few friends, and was pretty much completely lost. I’m wandering down a residential street - upscale area, large houses and lots of trees - when I spot a woman pushing a baby carriage coming in the other direction. She looked quite a bit like a woman I’d known years earlier in New Hampshire, but I figured that was just a coincidence until she stopped dead in her tracks, stared at me, and called me by name. Turns out her in-laws lived on that street and she was visiting.
That was a pretty freaky coincidence. Haven’t had another one like that since.
The people who live in the house behind my parents have an unusual surname, and it’s painted on their mailbox, which is mounted on a post right in front of my folks’ house. When my Mom’s sister visited for the first time after they bought the house, she noticed the name and went, “Hmmm …”
Turns out the neighbor lady had lived next door to my aunt more than 20 years previously. Since then, my aunt had divorced her first husband, moved back to Minnesota, remarried, then moved back to Washington. Neighbor lady had similarly divorced her first husband, moved to another state and remarried, thereby gaining the unusual surname, then also moved back to Washington. So strange.
I’m a native Houstonian. I graduated high school here in 1966, had two really close friends. We kinda lost touch for a while during and after college.
In 1980, I was sitting in the lobby of the Sari Pacific hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia when the parents of one of my two friends came in. Seems that they had retired and were doing an around-the-world trip.
