One of the women in my office has a new grandson. He’s a little bit younger than my newborn son, and he and his parents, my co-worker’s daughter and her husband, live in Atlanta. We were talking at lunch today about holiday plans, and she said that they were going to spend Christmas with her daughter’s husband’s parents in Virginia.
Since I’m from Virginia, I asked where his parents live. She said Richmond. I’m from Richmond. So jokingly, I asked what his last name was. She said “Smith” (not Smith, but a VERY common last name).
So I was just kidding around, since I remembered a Smith I went to school with, and asked what his first name was.
When she said “John”, my mouth dropped open.
It turns out her daughter is married to the John Smith that I know. We went to high school together, graduated in the same class, and lived across the street from each other! His parents and my parents still talk to each other.
So I called my mom, who said “Oh, I was just talking to his mom about her new grandson, Peter!”.
That’s my co-worker’s grandson!
:eek:
I am going to be hearing “It’s a Small World” in my head ALL FREAKIN’ DAY now.
My family was once visiting Disney World. We were taking the boat from the hotel to the theme park and started talking to some fellow passengers who were sitting next to us. Like us, they were from New York (not a major coincidence). Then they told us what town they lived in - and we had lived in that same town a few years before. Then they told us what street they lived on - and it turned out these random strangers we met in Florida lived two houses down the street from the house we used to live in.
When I was a kid, my mom and I were on a grocery and errand run “in town” and we had pulled into a gas station to fill up and use the bathroom.
My mom reached for the doorknob to the Ladies Room with me on her heels, and literally walked into a friend from college that she hadn’t seen in over 15 years. She was on vacation with her family. They altered their plans and followed us out to our house in the Boonies and stayed with us for a few days.
When I got married, I only had one friend from high school who I wanted to invite. Unfortunately, we had lost touch with each other and I didn’t know how to contact her. A week after we sent out the invitations, I got a call from her, saying she had just been invited to my wedding…
It turns out she had met a guy and married him; this guy was cool enough that he was one of the only people my wife worked with who she wanted to invite to the wedding, so she did…
My last boyfriend and I were born in the same small town in India. I moved, he grew up there.
The weird thing is that we lived (back when we still lived there) a couple blocks apart, he knew all my parents’ friends and their kids. We were even born in the same hospital, delivered by the same doctor, 2 weeks apart.
Had we not moved I would have grown up with him. It was pretty surreal. We met in a Zankou chicken.
One of my good online friends is a family friend of one of my professors. That still kind of weirds me out.
My best friend from elementary school ended up at the same college as one of my friends from church. They became friends after they found out they both knew me.
I ran into someone on the LJ feed for a webcomic who had a crush on a guy I dated in middle school.
When I started teaching at my current gig (at a small high school in Ma), I got chatting with some of the other faculty about where I grew up, etc. Turns out one of the other faculty (my mentor and department head) went to the same damn high school as I did - a small high school in northern NJ. We were separated by more than a couple of years, though. (I don’t think we had any teachers in common - and most of mine have retired recently.)
A few years ago, I am out in Narragansett Bay kayaking around with some of my family, when out of nowhere, I hear “Hey Mista Geek!” It wasn’t just one of my students on a boat: it was the three siblings I was teaching simultaneously!
We met in a Zankou Chicken restaurant in California. He’s in grad school here now and I work in the area. He came over to sit with me because I was alone and smiled vaguely in his direction which I guess he took as a friendly invitation.
When I was 6 my parents got a cat for the family. They got it from the next door neighbor of my aunt who lived on the other side of town. I distinctly remember going over to their house and picking up the cat. We had that cat for 2 or 3 years.
Fifteen years later, I am dating this girl that will end up being my current wife. I found out one year after we started dating that it was her family that were the next door neighbors and that it was one of her cat’s kittens that we ended up taking home with us when I was a kid.
On our last criuse to Hawaii, our luggage didn’t arrive in our cabin. When we asked the steward, he said he thought “You were all together”
It seems the couple in the room next to us had the same last name. Not an uncommon name, but not Smith or Jones common.
Once luggage was sorted out, we happened to meet the wife on the balconey. After a bit of comparing, it seemed possible that Hubby and her Hubby could be related.
Then her husband joined us. He looked more like my husband than his own brothers do!
What finally clinched the blood relationship, was the other guy knew of a (lost) family book, dating from the time the family move to the US from Ireland in the 1700s. The book sits, right now, in Hubby’s father’s safe!
I often wore Bucksnort Saloon T-Shirts, from my former home away from home - the tiny mountain bar that was a little farther down the little dirt road I lived on southwest of Denver. I was a little taken aback to run into someone else wearing one, though, when we were both taking snorkel instruction on an island on the Great Barrier Reef.
When going to college, it was mind-boggling how many people knew each other, and how many people knew people that I knew. For example, no fewer than six people in my dorm knew A.F., who is not at the college and whom I met at Chemistry Olympiad camp, from various other programs. Someone else knows A.C., who is from across the country. And I found that a friend of mine attending another college knows someone from down the hall.
Which just goes to prove that all smart math/science kids (and me) from across the US know each other.
I went to HS in Mississippi, and to college there as well.
I moved to California, then to Michigan.
I got a temp job, and sitting across from me was a girl wearing a sweatshirt from my college. Turns out, she went to the same HS as I did, and then the same college, exactly 10 years later.
while we were having the conversation, another lady interrupted, saying she was sorry, but did we mention we’d been to X HS and X college? She ALSO went to the same HS and college, but ten years EARLIER than me.
So here we all are, having moved several times to several states, at a dinky 2 week temp assignment, spanning 30 years of time, alumnae from the same HS and college which was 2500 miles away.
I was in a bookstore with my then-only-child, who was 18 months old. She began playing with another child (there was a children’s play area) and I began to chat with the little boy’s mom. It wasn’t long before we realized that our children were the same age, born on the same date, in the same hospital, delivered by the same doctor, about 1 1/2 hours apart! The hospital was not our local hospital either, but one located about an hour’s drive from our small town. My mom had told me that the doctor kept having to leave me to check on another laboring mother–and this woman whom I casually struck up a conversation with 18 months later was her!
In the early 90s, I was on holiday in Bahrain and met a Saudi fellow who’s wife is American. They live in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 13 years later I was on holiday in Laos and met an American couple while waiting for a delayed flight. The two couples are next-door neighbors in Dhahran.
My brother was set up with a woman by one of his friends. The woman was a friend of this guy’s wife.
After a few dates, my brother was at the new woman’s house for dinner. He was looking at the pics on her fridge and recognized one of the faces.
“Is this guy Dick, your step father?” It was.
Turns out her stepfather was our pediatrician, who played a BIG role in our young lives as both he and I suffered from a lot of ear problems and spent a good chunk of our lives in his office. Both of us went to this guy until we were 18 (he was 26 or so when he met this woman).
Now he’s marrying this woman and we get to hang out with our pediatrician. For us it’s like hanging out with Mr. Rodgers or Big Bird - a soothing influence from our childhood. Although every time I talk to him my ear sort of hurts
I was in the subway in Barcelona once when I saw someone who looked a lot like this guy who’d sat left-and-back from me in class for 6 years. Turns out it was (we were the only ones from our town to study in Barcelona).
In a NYC hotel, the lift stopped, and everybody cussed. In Spanish? and Catalan?? - turns out the only person there who wasn’t from or living in Barcelona was the lift mechanic, a Costa Rican who was being sworn in as a US citizen the following day.
While living in Miami, I called home one day and was told my uncle had just been on the phone telling my parents about this second-cousin of mine whose grandparents had taken the whole family to Venezuela in the 1940s. The second-cousin’s husband’s family was from the next province over, so as a 10yr anniversary trip they’d decided to come to Spain and meet relatives; Dad’s mom was the first person with our lastname listed in the phone book (she was listed as “Lastname, widow of”). Turns out Dad’s three cousins were living in the US: one in California, one in New Hampshire (in the town closest to the summer camp where I’d worked on the year of the aforementioned NYC visit), and one in Miami 20 minutes from my house. As I told Mom: “bloody family, can’t get rid of you even by moving 5000 km away!”
I was interviewing for a job in the States, 600 miles away from my Montreal home. While touring the lab facilities, the lab director kept introducing me an “Antigen, from Montreal”, until one woman asked me where in Montreal I currently worked. When I named the hospital, she gasped and said “do you know Alice?”
Turns out that the two of them met on a trip to Costa Rica several years ago and have been friends ever since, always living those 600 miles apart. Alice was very surprised to get a “hello” from her friend when I came back to work.
Not my small world, but I participated in someone else’s.
