What’s even weirder is that there was a movie called Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice!
I thought that was on purpose.
Duh. You guys must be old. (1969 movie – I was a senior in college.)
Whoosh!
I was at my parents house and my father was refinishing an antique oak end table that my mother had just purchased at a thrift shop. The front of the drawer had split and a big piece of it was missing. My mother anticipated that he would replace it with some other type of wood and that they would try to stain it to match the overall oak finish.
He said, “I think I might have a piece of oak from another project that I could use for this.” Right before my eyes, he walked over to a pile of cut-offs and dug through them to pull out a nice piece of solid oak. He walked back to the table and held it up to the drawer opening. It fit perfectly and was exactly the right thickness without a single saw cut. He literally just sanded and stained it.
When I was a little kid, we kids were hanging out in my parents’ bedroom and chatting. My mom was aggravated by her alarm clock which had become consistently inconsistent. She finally said “I’m going to have to break down and buy a new one,” when the alarm clock started to ring. It was not only not set to ‘on,’ it was not set to that particular time.
I ran into one of my high school Spanish teachers a couple of years after graduation at O’Hare. Not too big a deal (it’s a huge airport), but we had just come from Columbus Ohio waiting for our flight to L.A. She was coming from L.A. to somewhere else.
I was once travelling from Edinburgh to Paris via Heathrow (With Britisha Airways). On checking in I realised ny seat number was the same on both flights, fairly unusual given the planes have about 150 seats. However when we arrived at Heathrow we were told were we going ot an international gate and would be taken by bus to the domestic part of the terminal, I boarded the bus and then spent 15-20 minutes walking back ot the plane I had just just arrived on.
A friend of mine was playing dungeons and dragons and cast a fireball spell. To determine the amount of damage it causes he rolls 8 (standard 6 sided) dice. Every die came up 6 for 48 points of damage (proability 1 in 1,679,616) This was done online and I saw the dice roll so is legit.
Way back when I was in school in the days of land lines and dinosaurs I had an urge to call a friend of mine. I picked up the handset and heard nothing. No dial tone, no static, nothing. Then “Hello?” My friend had called me and I had picked up the phone before it had a chance to ring.
That happened to me several times “back in the day.”
A version of this happened to me. I was returning to SoCal from Speech Nationals in Charlotte. We changed planes in Denver, so I herded the kids to the right gate and we sat down in the only open seats. I glanced at the woman sitting next to me and it turned out to be the wife of a friend who was returning from grading AP Calc exams. We even had adjoining seats on the plane! The kids were a little weirded out by the whole thing.
Three examples:
When I was in grad school, I walked into my dorm and as I entered, I encountered my high school chemistry teacher, who was staying in that building for a day or two as a guest of the university. She had no idea I was there; we just happened to be in the same place at the same time.
I work at a firm with several thousand employees; people who work there are used to being asked if we know person X - and it’s very rare that we do. But a fellow (call him A) I sometimes work with was in Korea on a business trip and when a person (B) there learned that A worked at my firm, B asked “do you know Andy L?”. Startling!
Last example: I went to elementary school in a tiny town - and to high school in a different tiny town in a different state. A few years after high school I talked to a high school friend who mentioned someone she had met in college who had an unusual characteristic - and I was able to name this person, because I knew him in elementary school
And you missed the ultimate “Meet Cute” with your future spouse by thaaat much…
.
By the way, I do check out cars that could be one of my former rides. But no luck so far… the fact that almost all of them were totalled might be a factor.
Some years back, the Mrs. and I were vacationing in Death Valley. We were hiking up Mosaic Canyon, and encountered another couple, with whom we exchanged some pleasant chit chat for about 15 minutes, comparing notes and interests and determined they were staying in a different part of the park than we, 27 miles away from our motel in Stovepipe Wells. Then we all went our separate ways.
After we finished that hike, we headed 31 miles away to hike the Darwin falls trail. We bumped into the same couple coming back from the falls just as we were getting to it. More conversation, a good 30 minutes worth of it, ensued. We went our separate ways.
That night, after dining at the Stovepipe Wells restaurant, the Mrs. and I strolled over to the General store across the road, and discovered that same couple gassing up their car there! Again, lengthy conversation, laughs about the co-incidence, and parting again.
The very next day, as we were departing the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, we encountered them again, coming in! We decided it was fate, and hung out with them for 3 or 4 hours, and going on a hike together at Badwater. We did exchange contact info at that point, and again we parted.
The day after that, as we drove past the Devil’s Cornfield, we noticed their car on the side of the road, so we stopped and again chatted, random encounter #5 with them, in one of the largest national parks in the lower 48!
And that was it for the encounters but we kept looking over our shoulders for the few remaining days were were in Death Valley.
They eventually visited us 2 years later when they passed through our area, and we renewed acquaintanceship and had fun together again.
Same.
Sixty years ago, my mom and I went shopping. The family car was a green and white Ford station wagon. After shopping, we returned to our car and the key would not turn. Mom tried several times. After a minute, I looked in the back seat only to discover that we were in someone else’s car. We found our car four spaces away, but there was a man in our car trying to figure out why his key didn’t work.
That was you ?!?!?! (kidding)
Telepathic! That happened with my mom a couple times. I’d be thinking about her or her me one would dial and we’d both pick up the phone and voila before it would ring we’d be connected. We’d only talk occasionally long distance so it was always a huge coincidence. That, and I always did think she had supernatural powers sometimes.
I was walking a trail with a friend and I had my phone, an old lg, tucked in my pocket.
Suddenly about 3 miles in I hear my phone ringing, I had butt dialed my friend!
This morning, I was at Palermo airport waiting for my plane back home. There was a piano in the departure hall and I played 4 pieces before boarding, the last of which was Michael Nyman’s The Heart Asks Pleasure First.
When I got off the plane, I heard piano music in the distance and immediately smiled. A young woman was playing the same piece.
It was weirdly satisfying way of looping the loop.
That’s the making of a Twilight Zone episode also.
In 1975, I was cast in a small role in Arsenic and Old Lace at my community college. The week we opened, the local newspaper’s entertainment section ran a publicity photo of the scene I was in.
In 1977, I met kaylasmom, and kept courting her (finally married her in 1983. She was pursuing a career in music, and gigged as a chanteuse in several nightclubs, and was concerned that getting married might interfere with that; hence the long courtship).
Some years after we married, we were in her mother’s house, looking through a manila envelope full of clippings from her nightclub career. Found one with an ad for a restaurant that had a photo of her and her guitarist. I turned over the ad, and found the 1975 photo of me, raising a glass of elderberry wine to Mortimer Brewster.
While I was working in Boston, a rail buff cow-orker and I departed on a July 4th by train to Albany as the first leg of a mostly-train trip across Canada, with planned continuation from British Columbia to San Francisco, then to Chicago via the Zephyr, then back to Boston (cow-orker by train, me by plane). Days later we arrived (via CNRR) in Jasper, BC, for an overnight stay. Well, outside the motel, we ran into the Chairman of the Board of Selectmen (think mayor) of my New England hometown and his wife who were doing the same circle tour but in a clockwise direction. Such a coincidence! (I was on a hometown local traffic committee and met with the Board periodically to address local traffic issues). We all rented a car the next day and drove thru the Rockies to Banff and Lake Louise via the Jasper-Banff Highway, stopping to take the snowmobile tour onto the Columbia Icefield glacier. Then back to Jasper, etc. 9,000 miles in 16 days. My first and last trip west of Illinois (not counting Hannibal, MO).