Life's Little Coincidences

Reading this thread got me to thinking about one of the larger coincidences in my life…

I have used the services of two dentists (the first retired when I was about 19). Each of these gentlemen lived quite a distance away from his office, and had a daughter who lived at home in those distant towns.

I dated both of those daughters.

In both cases, I didn’t realize she was my dentist’s daughter when we started dating.

Rather odd, if you ask me. So, what’cha got? Any other interesting coincidences out there?
And before you ask, yes, it is rather nerve-wracking to have your girlfriend’s father stand over you with a drill, asking how your most recent date with his precious little angel went.

My biggest one was when I lost out in competition for a job I’d had at College A for a year to a more experienced professor from College B. The head of my department recommended me for her job and I got it. That’s not the coincidence, though.

The coincidence was that a few months earlier my husband had been hired by College B, in a completely different department. We’d been pleased because we were only going to be working a couple of hundred miles apart instead of on opposite sides of the country, which is not uncommon for dual academic couples just starting out.

I may have posted this before, but here goes:

In 1987 or so, I took a girl out on a date to a shopping mall in the Los Angeles area. I now work in an office in that very same shopping mall, and the mother of that girl I dated also works here, and the girl’s mother was, in fact, my boss up until about a year ago!

Funny coincidences seem to happen all the time on my block. The first was when I’d just bought the house and ran into a friend from Boston whom I had lost track of five years previously. She was looking for a new apartment in Providence, where she was going to school. I happened to have one open, and she moved in.

We had a get-acquainted dinner with the downstairs tenants, and they were talking about some girly thing – hair colors of the past, or something. Downstairs tenant goes to fetch a picture of herself to illustrate, and comes back with a picture taken in the kitchen of the very apartment my friend had just moved from. Downstairs tenant had lived there too, a few years before.

My friend lived here for two years while she finished school, and then left for a job in Boston. After a few months there, she met and started dating a new guy. At one point she was introduced to one of the new guy’s best friends since childhood. He was from Boston originally, but living in Providence, and they quickly established that they’d lived right across the street from each other all the time she lived here. I’d known him all the while – he’s actually a pretty close friend – but somehow she’d never met him. Four years later, she and the “new guy” are still together in Boston, and we all get together frequently.

After my friend moved to Boston, a couple of young women moved in here. Within a week one of them found that a guy she’d gone to college with in Western Massachusetts was living in the house next door.

Just recently I discovered that one of my best friends from grade school in Connecticut years ago lives just four doors down the street. And a guy I knew thirty or so years ago in Boston, whom I hadn’t seen in at least twenty years, has recently bought the house three doors down on the other side of the street.

I’ve decided that my block must be, in fact, the center of the universe.

My wife and I have a very strange coincidence. We met in high school and sort of kept bumping into each other after that and then started dating in college. That’s not the coincidence though. The coincidence was when I found out that she used to live next door to my cousins that I used to go visit a lot when I was young. Even more of a coincidence was that when I was young, we had a cat that we got from my cousins’ next door neighbor… my wife’s family!