Mind-blowing chance encounters [of the Small World kind - not celebrity]

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The closest I ever came to a really mind-blowing Chance Encounter of the Personal Kind was when I was about two hours away from bumping into a friend of mine from NYC, completely unplanned, at the Great Wall of China.

Neither of us knew the other was going on a trip to China, and posted FB pics of us at the Great Wall at the same location on the same day, except that he got there two hours before me. We ended up meeting for dinner that evening. Still amazing, but the thought of walking through a crowd of people and suddenly doing a double-take, “…Wait… That can’t have been…” literally halfway around the world would have been truly astonishing!

My mother-in-law, though, has the mother of all stories. Let’s see if you have one that’s as good or better.

She’d grown up as a child in a fifth floor walkup apartment in Astoria, Queens, where her mother (my wife’s grandmother) lived in for a total of about 50 years. I remember visiting there with my family - her great-grandchildren in tow - until around 2008, when by now in her late 80s, she was convinced to move to an apartment close by to my mother-in-law on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, one with an elevator in it.

About two years after this move occurred, my parents-in-law were hiking in Bear Mountain Park, a frequent pastime of theirs. Upon reaching one of their favorite resting points atop a ridge they found a friendly young twentysomething couple, and had the following conversation.

Isn’t the view from here great? We come here all the time.
– It’s our first time ever visiting Bear Mountain Park! We wanted to get somewhere a little farther from NYC for a hike.

[with obvious NY accents] We came here from NYC, too! From the UWS.
– [with obvious Midwestern? accents] Well, we’re not originally from NY; we moved here for/after college, but now we live together in Astoria. That’s in Queens!

Yes, I know Astoria, I grew up there! Where in Astoria?
– [Not wanting to give an actual address] It’s in a building called The Buchanan Arms.

No way! I grew up in that building! How do you like it?
– [A little surprised/suspicious at the coincidence] The apartment is nice, but there’s no elevator. But that makes it more affordable.

Yeah, if you live on an upper floor, it can be a hassle. But it keeps you in shape. My mother walked up five floors with bags of groceries into her 80s!
– Fifth floor? That’s where we live!

[Suspicious in turn at the coincidence] Yeah, OK. I don’t suppose it’s apartment [number]?
– Yeah. It is.

[Both couples are now suspicious about the coincidence and wondering if they’re being played somehow, for some strange reason.]

Mother-in-law: OK. Is there anything… Unusual in the hallway near the front door?

Young couple: Yes! There’s this spring-loaded wooden beam tied back with a rope that we can’t figure out what it’s for!

Mother-in-law: I can tell you what that is. My God, you really are living in my old apartment. See, my parents rigged that as a homemade burglar booby trap back in the mid 1960s…

This is 100% TRUE, I saw my grandmother-in-law demonstrate it once, when she left the apartment she’d release the tie-back mechanism so that anyone entering the apartment without knowing it was there would get a heavy wooden beam falling across the doorway, presumably onto their head. When entering the apartment herself, she’d reach over and disengage the trap from the doorway before crossing the threshold.

I like to think that the young New Astorians they met that day were less astonished at the coincidence of running into a woman in her late 50s who’d grown up in the very apartment they now lived in on a mountaintop 60 miles away, than in discovering the nature of the very weird booby trap that the building’s management evidently hadn’t removed in between tenants. Probably thinking it was “original to the apartment” because it’d been there longer than any of them.

2

That’s one heck of a coincidence, @robardin. Mine’s wildly improbable, but not quite as much as yours.

My wife and I met in college, and hail from towns 100+ miles apart. We knew nothing of each other or respective childhoods prior to college.

After moving into our first apartment, we sat on our balcony, noticing another young couple across the yard on their balcony. Simultaneously we realized each of us was looking at a close friend from elementary school, but didn’t know the other person (I grew up with the guy, had never seen the girl, exactly the reverse for my wife) Our respective childhood friends, who we hadn’t seen in a decade, had married each other, moved to our town, our apartment complex, and into a unit directly across from us.

Not impossible, but pretty low odds.

3

That’s also great!

The thing about that booby trap, for me, is that it had been a reference point of mine for years in terms of how deep the vein of what I called a “Nutty MacGyver” proclivity in my wife (and perhaps now, our son…) ran in her family. I even mentioned it when her grandmother finally left that apartment, how funny it would be if they didn’t remove it in the between-tenant renovations and how puzzled the next tenant would be to discover it.

And then… 18-24 months later… To find out that that is exactly what happened, and moreover the way that it was confirmed, is just insane. It’s like my entire existence was just background story for this one short story plot line that just played out in front of me.

There you go, that’s the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

4

The closest thing that comes to mind for me was the time I met a kid in 6th grade at a school in California who had lived on the same street as me a few years before. What’s strange is that the street we’d both lived on was in Galveston, Texas, and the school was in Alameda, California. In the intervening five years, I’d lived in Germany and Houston, Texas.

My sister once ran into a high school classmate in a Starbucks in Newport, Rhode Island. What’s odd is that the high school in question was in Heidelberg, Germany (and she was visiting me in Rhode Island from another state).

Lastly, I’ve run into all kinds of acquaintances and coworkers at Walt Disney World (even though I live in Connecticut)…probably a half dozen or more over the years. This seems improbable, but on the other hand I’m sure I walk by thousands of people in the course of a day there, so maybe it’s not as improbable as one might think.

5

Yeah, if you live in CT but have been to WDW “half a dozen or more” times (as I read it), or even a dozen or more times while running into multiple different people from back home while there… That’s not really that improbable, given WDW as a common holiday destination.

I know I’ve run into former schoolmates or co-workers at closer-to-home family vacation targets, like Great Wolf Lodge or Great Adventure or Sesame Place, just because hey, we’re about the same age with similar aged children and this is just where you go with kids in the summer, you know?

And we’re all in the same economic cohort, i.e., have the disposable income to travel to take a family vacation with kids every summer, we’re not just barbecuing in the local park, but we’re not flying to Europe or something either.

6

Some friends and roommates of mine from college did the standard post-graduation trip around Europe (staying in youth hostels and carrying around copies of Let’s Go: Europe). (Sadly, I did not go because I didn’t have a job lined up. I regret that to this day.) They met another friend and her group while waiting to enter the Louvre. Not so surprising, given that the Europe trip was such a cliche.

7

Back in the 80s, a friend of mine hitchhiked from Fairfield, CT to Providence to see a Dead show. The guy who picked us up offered a ride back, too, which was nice.

On the way home, around midnight on a weekday, I idly mentioned that my uncle lived in the town we were driving through, on I-95.

I looked over and he and my aunt were in the car next to us.

8

I’ve had several of these, which I’ve recounted on this Board before

1.) Ran into a former c-worker on the Riverwalk in San Antonio Texas. we were there for completely different reasons.

2.) Ran into someone I knew from Utah while canoeing on the Concord River in Massachusetts

3.) Ran into someone I knew from Upstate New York in the middle of Times Square. I was living in Utah, and she was living in Washington DC. If you’ve been to Times Square, you know how large and crowded it is. Even though we were both there at exactly the same time, the odds were that we would not have seen each other, so the fact that we actually did meet makes this the most amazing coincidence i know of.

The fact that I had several such cases indicates to me that there must be a much larger number of “near misses”, where I can close to meeting someone, but we were looking the other way, or one of us was 15 minutes too early, or something.

9

While living in Santa Barbara, I ran into someone else I knew in Peru twice, about a week apart, once at the Machu Picchu train station and again at a restaurant in Puno (they’re about 250 miles apart). I saw, then lost him in the crowd in the train station and thought “Huh, that really looked like Andy…” but convinced myself that I must have been mistaken, then walked into the restaurant a week later and there he was sitting at a table. He confirmed that he had been at the train station when I was.

Ran into my cousin from North Dakota in Las Vegas. I was there for a friend’s bachelor party. We were both picking up tickets to the same Penn and Teller show.

In college in Southern California, I went to Seattle with some friends for a swing dance festival. One of my friends invited us all to her house where her family had a bit of a family reunion party going. While talking to her and her aunt, somehow the topic of blindness came up, and I mentioned that I had a blind uncle who was a woodworker, and the aunt got a kind of funny look and started asking me more questions about him. It turned out that my friend and I were (distantly) related through several marriages (one of which had ended). I believe we ended up settling on calling ourselves 2nd ex-step-cousins-in-law. Now, the relationship is not that surprising since it’s awfully distant, but discovering it through that chance encounter certainly seems very unlikely.

10

I’ve told this story before here, but here goes. I was visiting my older son in Seattle in 1991 and my wife and I went to the Seattle Botanical Gardens accompanied by our younger son. There is a Japanese garden inside and we all went into it. My son was wearing, as it happened, a McGill sweatshirt He was going to college elsewhere and I have no idea where he even got it. He came up to me and said there was a man who wanted to talk to me. So I went over to talk to him. He said, “Your son tells me you are a professor at McGill.” “Uh huh.” “My son is a student there too.” “Oh?” (One of 40,000). “Yeah, he’s in graduate school”. “In what department?” “Mathematics.” Then I asked, “What is his name”. “Jim ____” he told me. “My god, he is my PhD student.” What’s amazing is that neither of us lived in Seattle, although my son and his daughter did and we were both visiting. And all this would not have happened if my other son had not been wearing a McGill sweatshirt.

11

That story reminds me of one where my son was participating in an Odyssey of the Mind competition in 6th grade. The competition was held at a school in southwest Connecticut. For some reason my son was wearing a Rice University sweatshirt, where I had gone to school two decades before.

One of the judges came up to my son and asked him about the sweatshirt, and he told her that it was where I had gone to school. It turns out the judge was the wife of the university president while I was there a student!

What was embarrassing was that I instantly remembered where I had last met this lovely, distinguished woman who was the wife of a divinity professor and university president:

It was on the annual Halloween Baker 13 run, which involved a group of several hundred naked students covered in shaving cream. :flushed:

One of the traditional stops on the Halloween run was a detour for trick-or-treating at the university president’s house, and somehow I ended up at the front of the group. We all shouted out “Trick or Treat!”, at which point she gave me a fun-sized Snickers bar. (Actually, because my hands were full holding cans of shaving cream, she unwrapped the candy and put it in my mouth.) Needless to say, when I met her again with my wife and son 20 years later, I did not bring any of this up.

Here’s what I did NOT say: “So, I don’t know if you remember me or not, but the last time we met, I was naked and covered in shaving cream, and you put a Snickers bar in my mouth.” :face_with_raised_eyebrow: Somehow this made sense in college back in the 1980s…)

12

I worked at a software company once, with sales offices around the country. At one company meeting, I was talking to the salesguy from the Buffalo office. He asked where I was from. As usual, I just said Connecticut. He pressed further, so I said outside New Haven. He kept pressing, so after naming the town and the street on which I grew up, he mentioned the street that his in-laws lived on, which is the next street over from the one where I grew up.

13

My father grew up in Galveston!

14

I’ve had a number of mind-blowing coincidences. A recent one: in 2017 I took a private birding trip to West Papua, in the Indonesian part of New Guinea, and stayed at a small hotel for birders located in the town of Nimbokrang. Staying in the same place were a young Chinese couple, who joined us on a birding trip to a nearby site.

The next year, I took an organized birding trip to Borneo, and visited Mt. Kinabalu National Park. While I was on an observation deck, a young Chinese woman approached me and asked if I had been birding in Nimbokrang the year before. She recognized me from the earlier trip. Now, we were both birders visiting known birding sites but it was still amazing that our paths crossed.

This and other stories above makes me wonder how many times we “just miss” seeing someone we know from a distant location. There must be many times when we miss seeing someone by a day, and hour, or just because we happened to be looking in the wrong direction at a critical moment.

15

My cousin came to visit me, and while she was here, we decided to go to DC and walk around the sites. One place we went was Arlington Cemetery. While we were there, she happened to run into her next-door neighbor from Ohio, who was expecting her to pick up their mail for them while they were on vacation.

oops!

16

Years ago, my spouse and I moved from DC to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia (basically an extra-extreme exurb). We bought a cedar house on 6 acres custom built in 1987 in a community of 5+ acre homes.

A few months after the move, we took a motorcycle trip to the “interior” of WV and were about 6 hours from home in the mountains when we stopped in at an antique store to browse.

We got talking to the only other customer there, and (much like the winnowing-down conversations y’all have described) it turned out that he was the builder who built our house!

Not only that, he had bought the 200 acres of farmland originally and created the development. He built our house first, on the prime lot, and lived in it for years. So he told us all kinds of lore about the house and the community.

It was especially mindblowing because my spouse and I were pretty stoned at the time.

17

Well, I thought I would have the best story, but y’all have some good ones. Regardless…

My dad was born in L.A. in 1950. He has a brother 18 months older. When my dad was 6 or 7 his parents divorced, and my grandmother married a recently separated man who had just moved to California from Cape Cod. The relationship that he had been which had just failed, had produced a daughter.

My grandmother and her new husband (the man I call my grandfather) and my dad and his brother would go back east to Massachusetts every other year or so so they could visit my grandfather’s daughter. They only did this a couple of times before my grandparents moved to Oregon ca. 1964. Neither my grandfather’s daughter or her mother never came to Oregon to visit, and the trips to Massachusetts stopped. I didn’t even know my dad had a step-sister until I was in my teens because, sometime in the late 1970’s, my grandparents cut off all contact with her. I don’t know the details, but it had something to do with money (doesn’t it always… ?)

Anyway, fast-forward to 2010. My parents are vacationing in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. This is the first time either one had ever been out of the country. They were having dinner in some dive – and very non-touristy – restaurant & bar where nobody spoke English and, while waiting for the dinner to arrive, they peruse one of the pamphlets that was sitting on the table. My dad was looking through this pamphlet on a local guitar festival when a name caught his eye: it was one of the concert organizers who had the same name as his step-sister. In 1964 she had a French first name and an Italian surname, so it was quite unique. This mystery woman had the same name. My dad takes the pamphlet up to the bar and asks the waiter if he had any idea how to contact the concert organizers because there was a tiny, minuscule chance he might know one of them.

Which one? The barkeep asks.

My dad points to her name.

Barkeep becomes suspicious. Asks how this gringo knows one of the locals. My dad replies that he has a long-lost sister with the same name.

Barkeep stares at him for a minute and then asks, Are you (my dad’s name) and is your brother (my uncle’s name)?

Holy. Shit.

Barkeep disappears into the back of the cantina and then, 10 minutes later or so while my mom and dad are sitting there wondering just what the hell had happened, my dad’s step-sister walks in. Big tearful reunion, hugs all around, people clapping, the works. Turns out the barkeep and her were friends, and she had told him numerous stories of growing up on cape Cod and having a couple of long-lost stepbrothers that she hadn’t seen since the early 60’s and had no idea where they were. When my dad identified himself to the barkeep, he had gone to the phone in the back to call her and tell her to get down to the bar pronto. Her brother had just walked in.

The hadn’t seen each other in 46 years but managed to meet each other again because dad, bored, picked up a discarded pamphlet from a sticky beer-stained table in a dark dingy bar in Mexico.

The guitar festival started that weekend, and on opening night, my dad’s stepsister, who was doing the whole “the organizers would like to thank…” part of the opening ceremony of course told a CliffsNotes version of the story to this huge crowded ampitheter, and then introduced my folks on stage. Apparently the applause was thunderous.

My folks still talk about that week in Mexico, and my dad meeting his stepsister again.

18

This one is my favorite. /misty eyed/

19

I may have mentioned this here before.
I was playing a game on Facebook where you have to interact with other players and trade items to each other. In order to do that, you have to friend them as if they were really friends of yours, even if you don’t know them. So you see their posts as equally as your real friends. One day, a person I had friended to play the game with, sent a post to a girl whose last name was Kitchen, my name. And the post was a picture from my first cousin’s high school year book, of him. It turned out the two women were my cousin’s daughters, whom I knew OF, but I don’t think had ever met.

20

Not as amazing/personal as most of the other stories, and I think I’ve posted it before, but I remember my mother once got talking with a stranger who mentioned they had spent some time working in Africa. “Oh!” says mum, “I know someone who works in Africa!” - we of course all sniggered , but yup, turned out the stranger had indeed met my mum’s friend. OK, so a lot of expat communities in Africa are probably close-knit, but it’s a big place…