It's a small world

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

It just got a little smaller for me on Saturday. I can see your apartment from my apartment! Well, not really, because my windows face the wrong way.

An ex’s grandmother lived right around the corner from her childhood friend from Halifax. They’d been neighbors for something like 50 years, and never knew it.

Same ex developed health problems, and need to get a kidney transplant. As it turns out, her transplant doctor’s father delivered my brother. That was 40-some years prior, in a different part of the country.

42

One of my classmates from childhood moved our Junior year of high school. We werent’ friends, but were friendly. Five years later, I ran into her at church. She and her husband were attending the same college as Mr. Woodhouse and I. Fast forward another five years, I was visiting a SIL and ran into childhood aquantaince again . . . at church in another town many, many hundreds of miles away from our college town. She was in my SIL’s congregation. I expect to see her again in two years or so when it’s been another five years since I’ve seen her. I expect this meeting will take place in a church.

Also, one of my online friends from the midwest is close friends with another classmate of mine from grade school. I do think the internet makes the world feel even smaller.

43

One of the members here has twice mentioned knowing someone who thought Leaving Las Vegas was the sequel to Honeymoon In Vegas and was sorely disappointed when she saw it.

I strongly suspect that he was talking about my sister, who made this same mistake. He lists his location as Texas, and she lives in Dallas.

44

My cousin and his wife were married for over five years before they realized they’d attended the same wedding for friends in San Jose, California, about ten years earlier, before the cousin and wife met one another.

A very long time ago I was standing in line at an American Express office in Rome, where they would hold mail for a few weeks for travelers. I struck up a conversation with the kid in front of me and discovered that he and my brother had been roommates at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

My former husband and I were walking down the Stroget, a pedestrian shopping street in Copenhagen. We overheard a couple speaking American English while looking in a shop window - the male had been my husband’s dentist in South Dakota.

45

Years ago on a family holiday near Benidorm, my brother was in a long queue up the stairs to get to the top of the water slide. As he neared the front some one tried to push in front of him. When he confronted the kid, it was a guy who sat next to him in English class at school. It still didn’t endear my brother to the kid enough to let him push in front!

46

I went to Disney World 4 or 5 years ago and while standing in line for the Barnstormer I saw the guy who works on our phone system at work, he was 8 or 10 people ahead of us.

47

I always tell this story whenever we have a “small world” thread. Twenty years ago, while mountain climbing in Colorado, I met a guy named Garon at the summit of Mt. Elbert. It turned out that he dated a girl in Singapore that I dated in Houston.

48

My husband (then boyfriend) had an online diary about five years ago. It was anonymous, like a Livejournal, and you could “meet” people by leaving posts on their diary entries. You would make friends with people and comment on each others’ diary posts…very much like Livejournal, actually, but a somewhat smaller community. He’s a writer and would post stuff about his projects, post entries as “characters,” et cetera, just as writing exercises.

So this high school-aged girl started commenting on his diary; I guess she found his writing interesting. I have no idea how she found him, and there was no reason for me to believe she’d found him through any identifying details, as he didn’t use any on the website. But he got to chatting with her over PMs (or their equivalent) and she said she was from Ohio.

Him: “Really? My girlfriend is from Ohio.”
Her: “Where in Ohio?”

Well, it turned out she went to my high school. She was too young to have known me, though. That’s as far as the conversation went, because my boyfriend didn’t want to be a creepy guy talking to a 16-year-old online. She still left him comments and all, because she really liked him.

Well…out of curiosity, I did some research on her diary, and I found out she was in the marching band, along with my little sister. She was actually the field commander (drum major), the girl who led the band, so I could pinpoint her identity, down to her full name. I had been in that band at one point–just a few years earlier, my very good friend had held the same post as her. Only about 70 students are in the band. It’s a fairly small high school. How amazing is it that she randomly found the boyfriend of a band alum, living hundreds of miles away?!

The really weird part was when we actually drove the 8 hours back to Ohio to see my sister in a band competition. I kept thinking, if the girl leading the band only knew that not only did this guy online know exactly who she was, but was in the audience watching her… Wow, kind of creepy. He never mentioned it, of course. I’ve been pretty paranoid about internet stalkers ever since.

49

On a flight to London my sister struck a conversation with the person next to her. Turns out that person was her best-friend’s brother’s roommate in college. Fun, but not totally crazy.

On the flight back from London she struck a conversation with the person next to her… who was best-friends with the person on the first plane.
Now that was crazy.

Gotta say- this made me laugh.

50

Long ago, I met a dude at a social function in Boston. Never saw him again until I was in the mess line at Great Lakes Naval Training Center two years later and he was in the line behind me.

A year or so later, while in a Navy Class “A” school at Bainbridge Naval Training Center, I ran into a WAVE drill instructor that I had gone through high school with 7 years earlier. (That was the WAVE boot camp, as well as a co-ed training school center.)

A year later, while my navy ship was homeported next to Nice, France, I was at the Nice railroad depot and ran into a guy from my hometown with whom I had gone through school K-12.

(Join the Navy and see…your old friends)

After getting out of the navy and coming back ito Boston, on the street in downtown I ran into a shipmate with whom I had hit the beach in Malaga, Spain, 3 years earlier.

While checking into a motel in Jasper, B.C., after traveling across Canada from Massachusetts by train, and prior to traveling south and then counterclockwise back across the USA by train, I ran into my hometown’s mayor and wife, who were friends of mine, after they had traveled by train clockwise from Mass. across the USA, prior to their returning to Mass. via Canada trains. The four of us rented a car and drove the Jasper-Banff Highway and stopped to ride on the Columbia Icefields.

While I was traveling on that same trip south by car and train from Canada to S.F., we took the Skunk Train through the redwoods from Willets to Fort Bragg Calif. 35 years later while eating brunch in a North Carolina restaurant, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was in town to climb a very tall radio antenna to fix the strobe lights. He was from Fort Bragg, CA. and had a cow-orker with MY EXACT (REAL) NAME.

Around that same time, I read an obituary in the Raleigh paper of a man with my exact first formal name, middle initial, and last name. Fortunately the picture was not of me.