Truth is stranger than fiction

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I once called our cell phone company to report a problem early one Saturday morning. The woman I was speaking to had a Boston accent. After we had solved the problem, she asked me if I came from Boston. “Yes, but I moved to NJ about 25 years ago and haven’t been back in a long time.”

There was a stunned silence, and then she asked “Is your name (first name I haven’t used since I left Boston).” This time the stunned silence was on my end. I finally asked “How did you know that and who are you?” Turned out we were in the same class in elementary school!

82

Correct. While I don’t question Sampiro’s veracity, I have some real problems accepting the accuracy of his source’s memories.

Doing some googling I find her on one blog, described as an amazing speaker, and with similar claims. Nothing on Wiki, or anywhere that could give us some verification. The stories just defy belief for me. Not just that they all happened to one person, but that they happened at all. Pretty sure the Brits didn’t spend a whole lot of time rescuing newborn Dutch Jewish infants, for starters.

83

DR, DNB (did not buy)

84

I work for a combined military reserve and cadet flying unit in northern Ontario, Canada. We do regular operations there, but the same crews go down to another site in the summer to teach at a flying school that produces the new pilots to go back out to the remote units like ours. I’ve got three stories from that unit:

First Story: Two of the cities in our serviced region are Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. One summer, an instructor from our unit goes down to teach at the school as usual. He’s from the Sault, and it turns out one if his four assigned students is form Sudbury. It’s unusual enough to get a student from your own region. After the summer is over, they come back to my unit, and get to know each other a little better than the officer/cadet scenario at the school allowed. Turns out they both have some German heritage. Turns out both of their fathers emigrated form Germany in the years after the second world war, married Canadian women, and settled in adjacent cities in northern Ontario. Turns out both of those fathers emigrated from the same little village in Schwabia… only to have their eventual sons join the same youth flying program, go to the same flying school, and have one be assigned as the instructor of the other, and later work together as pilots.

Second story: I’d kind of lost touch with one of our former staff; he’d moved away to university and work in a city outside the region. For my part, I took a few months away from the unit while I was a student in Europe for a semester. At the end of that trip, I spend a couple of weeks just travelling around in Europe – my first real chance to do this. My very first stop was Berlin. I took a long series of trains and trams, got to my hostel, dropped my bags, and went walking down the street to a supermarket to get some food. On the way, I passed a couple of people – one I didn’t recognize, and one who looked vaguely familiar in the dark autumn evening. I got a few paces past them before I wheeled around and called his last name. Turns out this ex-flying centre staff were staying in the same room of the same hostel in east Berlin. We hung out and caught up on each other’s lives; neither of us had known the other was in Europe.

Third story: I’m from the city of Sudbury, in Ontario, but I went to university in Ottawa, some hundreds of kilometres away. I was once sitting in class, waiting for a lecture and chatting with one of my university friends from a third city that’s not near either of those, and telling a story about flying. My friend, who’s not a pilot, mentions that one of his friends told him similar stories about her job as a pilot. I asked where she was from… he named a fourth city. I then asked he name, and he was reluctant to play along, in a ‘give it up it’s not the same girl’ way. I pressed him to humour me – he told me the first name, and I responded with the correct last name. They’d met online and had been friends for years.

And now, an unrelated story. At one point I moved to the Netherlands for work. I spent some time searching around to get the know the country a bit, and happened to find a master’s program at a Dutch university (in Delft) with a Canadian student profiled on its website. How nice, there’s at least one other Canadian in that country, I thought.

Days after arriving, and before my first day of work in Noordwijk, I was invited to a barbecue at the home of one of my new coworkers, in a third city, Leiden. I mingled with some of the other guests, and one of them was telling me about his masters studies. At one point I stopped him, took a good look at his face, and asked: “Are you on the website?”. It was the same dude. He was actually kind of annoyed to be recognized in this way, but I thought it was fun.
And finally: I grew up on the edge of a forested area, and once, when out playing, I came upon a bowie knife in the forest. I brought it home, figuring I’d be a good boy and not play with knives, and maybe we could find the owner? Turns out my father had lost it fifteen years or so earlier.

85

Nearly every member of my family - my son, mother, father, stepfather, sister, brother-in-law, etc. - breaks down to a 9. Those who do not were born on the 9th of the month (11/9 for me, 1/9 for my nephew, 10/9 for my grandmother). This holds true for the dates of all successful marriages in my family as well.

When my husband and I were first engaged, we were discussing our wedding plans and discovered this “Rule of 9s” as we call it, and moved our wedding date to a Tuesday so it would fall in line as well.

86

He lost it before you were born?

87

Yes, I believe so.

88

Cool.

89

Back in, uhm, must’a been 1980 or 1981, the viewing share of Dallas (the TV series, not the town) for my hometown plummeted when the SiL of one of the two pediatricians came over to visit, with her brand-new husband in tow, and claimed her daughter. Yeah, the one who until then we’d thought was the youngest of Doc’s four daughters. Turns out she was half-sister and half-niece to her elder sisters. This was followed by Doc’s divorce and, within less than half a year, his remarriage to an (also just-divorced) woman who already had ten sons; note that the ink was still wet on Spain’s divorce law, so a divorce was still a big scandal just by itself. They’ve had two daughters in common, which makes many women laugh with glee, as they know that his first wife’s “inability to produce a son” had been a source of tension in their marriage.

With reality like that, who needs JR!

90

I know lots of people who all know this one dude (Drew), but considering they’re all in the same enlarged queer/pagan/poly/Fringe Festival/etc. crowd, that’s not so surprising.

The most bewildering moment, though, was one time when I was in Madrid, out with some friends to get a falafel; I turned the corner and ran into my Spanish teacher, of all people. Which doesn’t sound that weird, except that she was from Chile, not Spain, and she was only in Madrid overnight on her way to summer in Alicante.

91

Oh, yeh, and one that was relevant here on the SDMB:

In high school, I hung out with the sk8rs. There were about 6 of us – small town, right? For the majority of my high school career, I spent my time with two guys in particular, KJ and Eric Mumpower.

I recently reconnected with KJ and he told me a story about trying to track down Eric, as he was always the “fine-line-between-genius-and-insanity” type and would literally forget that he had set the phone down while you were on it waiting for him to come back from answering the door – in other words, not the best person to keep up friendships. KJ did a bunch of google-fu and found an email address for Eric Mumpower at MIT. Well, crap, that stood to reason, as Eric was beyond bright, right? So KJ emails this guy who turns out not to be our Eric, but – his cousin!

I mentioned this story here on the SDMB and it turns out another poster (tdn ? I forget) has worked with the cousin Eric Mumpower. What really makes it all even stranger is that our Eric is a huge Tori Amos fan – so is his cousin, apparently. Although our Eric is a huge nerd (he was the first person to have a mouse, a modem, and any other computer gadget that came out), he has absolutely no web presence, while his cousin with the same name pops up like wildflowers!

92

I’ve been thinking about Master Wang-Ka lately; here’s his Jehovah’s Witnesses story, which he’s said is true.

93

This isn’t very spectacular, but wolfstu’s European stories reminded me:

Years ago when I was a newspaper reporter I was doing a story on holiday traditions in other countries, interviewing people of various nationalities and ethnicities in the city where I lived. I interviewed two German women, a French woman and a Jewish couple.

In the interest of expediency, I suppose, I interviewed the two German women together, one of whom came to this country as a World War II war bride and the other who was a recent immigrant. They were about the same age, though; maybe the war bride was about 10 years older.

Anyway, one of the ladies was from Mannheim, which (as Google now tells me) is just across the Rhine River from another city, Ludwigshafen, which is where the other woman was from. Both had lived in this town (in the U.S., where we all lived) for several years and knew of one another, but had never met. When I interviewed them, they realized they had a lot in common, geographically speaking, and had a lovely time discussing the sites and people of their old hometowns.

I just sat there watching them chat happily in German (and not understanding a word), and happy myself that I had brought them together!

94

My mother can do all sorts of fun and magical things – she just has a gift for making things happen. Celebrities appear on cue, events are delayed if she’s late, people offer her free travel and accommodations, etc.

My favorite story happened one day a few years ago. I only get to visit my Mom a few times a year, and when we’re together, we often go shopping for clothing. One day we were in a large department store, headed for women’s clothing, when we passed by the jewelry counter. There was a large stack of dozens of different pieces of boxed jewelry: bracelets, necklaces, pendants. I started looking through them, to see if there was anything I liked, and I found one really nice pin, a bird with blue and green crystals. I picked it up to show it to my Mom.

“Yeah, I bought that for you,” she said.
“How could you buy it for me – I’m standing right here and I just showed it to you this second?”
“I already bought it for you. It’s at home. I was planning to give it to you for your birthday or maybe Chanukah.”

Sure enough, when we got home, she pulled out the exact piece of jewelry that I had picked off the table.

95

I’ve been dating the same woman for almost 20 months now. We met a year before we started dating. Her parents came from the east coast. Father was born and raised in a Syrian neighborhood in Brooklyn, Mother I believe was raised in upstate NY somewhere. Both lawyers, they ended up meeting when they were on opposite sides of the same court case.

When my girlfriend was three or so, both parents were made full partners at a law firm in Chicago. It was a big deal for her mother, since she was the first female partner at that law firm. They got an apartment in Chicago, and after a while, her mother became pregnant with her sister. Her parents wanted to take a vacation at one point, but didn’t know where to go, being that they were east-coasters their whole life and they’ve even conceded that to many in the east coast, everything outside of Chicago in the interior of the nation could be just as well marked “Here Be Dragons” on a map. One of their coworkers suggested Door County, Wisconsin, and their first response was along the lines of “Wisconsin!? What’s there to do in Wisconsin?” The coworker insisted they should go visit for a weekend, so they packed up the car and took a weekend vacation to northern Door County. That weekend they fell in love with the place, so much so that they went back the following weekend to place a down-payment on a condo overlooking the bluffs of Ellison Bay. Unlike most people, they bought their vacation home first. They spent many weekends up there. Now I’ve been in Chicago area since my undergrad at Northwestern University, which puts me about 14 years or so. After my separation in mid 2005, I joined a social networking group in the city, where I ended up meeting her. Where did I grow up? About 10 minutes from her parents’ vacation home. Granted, with 6 years difference between us, it’s unlikely we ever would have met growing up. But it is kind of eerie that she’s intimately familiar with my home town, having spent many a weekend and vacation up there.

Along those lines, I have a knack for meeting people I know either from high school or college at various places in the City, where one wouldn’t expect it.

A year out of college, I was at a goodbye/welcome-back party for a friend of mine who graduated with me (and was a fellow initiate in my pledge class in the music fraternity I’m in). He had gotten a job in the Chicago area, but he had lost it when they realized they didn’t have the budget to hire him, so instead he had gotten another job out on the east coast, but then just as he was about to leave, and after his friends had organized a good-bye party for him, the first company realized they could afford to hire him. So he stayed in Chicago. Now, I’m at this party, and I run into someone from my high school class. Granted, there were only 45 people who graduated with me in my high school class. Apparently, she had been friends for many years with the guy in whose honor this party was thrown, though are paths hadn’t ever crossed since my Freshman year. (She used to date another guy a year older than me in high school who also went to Northwestern, and I had hitched a ride from him home for Thanksgiving. She was going to school at Madison, so we swung by and picked her up. It’s possible she ended up meeting my friend through various connections at NU, but still, it was a bit odd.)

Then around the same period, I’m at another party of some friends of mine from college who were still undergrads. (I think they were Seniors at this point.) And I’m talking to a bunch of people I know, when some girl mentions my name. I look, and can’t for the life of me figure out who it is. Turns out, she was a girl in my school about 5 years younger than me, who was the first since me to go to Northwestern from my high school. (It was a small high school.) On a side note, she was descended from one of the founders of NU, which meant she got free tuition.

Then a couple years ago, I’m helping a friend move is stuff from his apartment to a storage shed in the Armitage/Ashland area of Chicago since he was moving in with his girlfriend. I manage to run into a guy who was a year ahead of me in college and lived in my dorm.

Around this same time, I’m hanging out with same said friend and his girlfriend in Wicker Park’s Six Corners, and run into another guy who was in my pledge class and initiated the music fraternity with me. Apparently he was in Chicago for the weekend (he currently lives on the east coast somewhere.)

Then there was last year, when my girlfriend and I were extras on the Batman set for charity. The group we were with got sat down next to another group for another charity. One of the guys with that group graduated with me at Northwestern. We never met in our four years there, but he knew many of the same people I did. We were within the same social circles at various points, but never at the same time. Now I know that there are a lot of NU grads in the Chicago area, but I have this knack for meeting people I know in the most unlikely places.

96

About 12 years ago, when my oldest child was about 18 months old, we were in a small bookstore, and I struck up a conversation with a woman who had a little boy about the same age as my daughter. Of course, we talked about our children and I asked her how old her son was. It turned out that our children were not only the same age, but they had the same birthday, were born in the same city (which was an hour’s drive from my home–in another state) and the same hospital, and were delivered by the same doctor. In fact, her son was only about an hour and a half older than my girl.

When I was in labor, my doctor kept having to leave me to check on another laboring patient–and by sheer chance, I’d run into her in my local bookstore!

97

Chanteuse, my son went through four grades of school with a little girl who was born on the same day as he. I live in a medium-size city, and the hospital is in the general neighborhood as where we live, so not too surprising. But, it’s the largest baby-delivery hospital in the city, and lots of babies from out of town are born here as well. It’s interesting but not altogether remarkable that I was in labor the same time as a fellow parishioner, and our children would grow up side-by-side.

98

Years before I was born, my mom had a boyfriend in NYC. She came up to visit him at his apartment one weekend, and late at night before falling asleep they heard a blood curdling scream from a building nearby. They were spooked, but neither called the cops about it.

 Both go to sleep, and both wake in the morning in a terrible fright. It turns out that they had as far as they could tell the *exact*  same dream. Both my mom and her boyfriend dreamed that they were in a building and opened a door to see a woman who had hung herself from the ceiling of a purple bathroom.

 Although they never heard any more about the scream they heard that night, one has to wonder...
99

Len was my best friend in high school here in Houston. We were thicker than thieves. I spent many hours at his house, and his mom and dad taught me how to play poker. We graduated in 1966, went our seperate ways and fell out of touch.

Fast forward to 1981. I’m sitting in a hotel lobby in Jakarta, Indonesia, and his mom and dad walk in. They had retired and were on an around-the-world jaunt.

Small world indeed…

100

When I was just a car-crazy punk kid, I worked in a rental yard, and one day a guy came in driving a Sunbeam Tiger. Turned out his gas pedal was broken. I knew something about welding, so I got out the shop’s arc welder, inserted myself under the dash (a Tiger is a pretty small car), and welded his gas pedal back together.

Twenty-five years later, my friend Bob, a British-car fiend if ever there was one, enlisted me to help him drive his new acquisition home from way the hell-and-gone out in the sticks. You can see this coming, can’t you? I stuck my head under the dash, and sure enough, there was my welding job on the gas pedal. :slight_smile: