Wow. A week or so ago, I meet this guy on a laptop at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. We talk a little while, turns out he’s here to learn German, but he’s from Boston. Fair enough. A couple of days later, I’m drunk and waiting on my friend’s ride to take him home. Here he (other guy) comes. Hey, what is he doing here? Turns out he lives right around the corner from me, about a 2 minute walk. Not that big of a coincidence, considering there are only how many millions of people in this city?
This just happened yesterday…
My family name is one that is not common outside of the Mennonite/Amish world. It so happens that one of the research scientists where I work has the same name, and we exchanged e-mails yesterday for the first time because he got something intended for me. Highly paraphrased, the exchange went something like this.
Him: “Where are you from? I grew up in West Liberty, OH.”
Me: “I grew up in Goshen, Indiana, but moved here from Indianapolis. BTW, when I was a kid, we had neighbors across the street move in from West Liberty. The father was a Mennonite minister, and the family name was Koch.”
Him: “When I was a kid, we had people down the street named Koch move away, and I never knew what happened to them. That was in the 60s…”
Me: " It was the late 60s when they moved in…" and I described what I remembered of the family.
Turns out we knew the same people.
Back in ninth grade I left Orlando for a summer to go to a boy scout summer camp in North Carolina. Camp Daniel Boone. Now you have to understand, while I know my family name is not unheard of, I mean, we’ve got Dale Jarrett for one. But I had never actually MET a Jarrett who wasn’t related to me.
So here I am up in North Carolina, several hours from anywhere, and I had just finished the swimming test so that I could take the weeklong hike in the Appalachian. As I was towelling off I hear “JARRETT!!!” and I turn to see who is bellowing for me.
Now to give some background, as far as the family can tell, the Jarrett name was brought to the US in the 1700s when four brothers stowed away on a ship and crossed the great big lake. The four brothers split ways when they got here, one in Pennsylvania, one in West Virginia, one went west and one went to New England. I’m descended from the brother in West Virginia.
As it turns out there were two kids, a brother and sister, who were in Explorers and had come to the camp. As it turns out, they were from Boca Raton Florida and were descended from the Pennsylvania Jarrett.
And since then I’ve yet to meet another Jarrett without being at a family function. So the only Jarrett’s I’ve met were from Florida but I had to go to North Carolina to meet them.
I worked with a guy years and years ago at a video store, and he had this weird pimple looking thing on his eyelid that I had a bad feeling about. After it stuck around for a while and didn’t get better, I talked him into getting it checked, and it turned out to be a cancer. He was eternally grateful to me, since he said he never in a million years would have had it checked if I hadn’t kept bugging him. We stayed friends, and I even testified for him in a suit against our former employer.
A few years past and we lost touch- he moved back to Dallas, where he’d spent a lot of his life. My then boyfriend (now husband) Allan and I were going to a family party and the whole gang was there. And there stood Doug- he was his cousin. It was so wild.
Last year I was on vacation in Europe and I was at the Stafford International Classic Motorcycle show in Stafford, England talking to a vendor about a buddy of mine who lives here in Houston when the guy we were talking about tapped me on the shoulder (neither one of us knew the other was going to the show).
Then
A few days later I took a side trip to Munich, Germany to go to the BMW museum (they have a bike like mine on the floor and there are very few of these bikes left) so I get out my camera and I am taking some detail photos of the bike when someone says “you sure are into that thing”, without looking I say “I have one of these in my garage back home in Texas” and he says “Unclviny?”, it turned out to be an internet buddy who lives in Moscow and neither of us knew the other was going to be there.
Unclviny