I find it fascinating when I run into the small world phenomenon and am amazed it has happened twice in the past week.
Several months ago, I joined a small group of folks that have turned their efforts at weightloss into a competition. We meet weekly to weigh in and visit briefly. Sometimes we go to dinner afterwards at Sweet Tomatoes, a salad bar buffet. Because I was showing up with my bike helmet and shoes to the weigh-ins, questions arose about my biking. This led to a little further discussion about other things I do to reduce my impact, such as cooking with a solar oven and eating a vegan diet.
One of the older ladies told me her niece was into many of the same things and asked if she could have her email me. I said sure and gave her my email address. The next week, she mentioned that she'd misplaced my email address but I forgot to give it to her again. Another couple of weeks passed before we both remembered and she got it again. Weeks passed and I didn't receive an email; that's okay. People move in their own time.
This week, I went over to her home for a couple of hours to help her begin packing up knick-knacks so she can put her house up for sale. Some family also showed up to help ... including the niece I'd heard about. After introductions, the niece explained that she had also misplaced my email address. I gave her one of my blog business cards so she'd be able to get in touch with me.
She looked at the card with an odd expression on her face and said, "I think we bought a bike trailer from you a couple of years ago." For the moment, I couldn't remember selling any bike trailers but she went on to say it was on craigslist and her husband and children had come to buy it. Oh, yeah - now that's ringing a bell. We'd picked up a homemade bike trailer at a yard sale and decided not to keep it. When we listed the ad, she called me about it and we talked for a while. I even told her about the blog and she evidently checked it out way back then.
In a city of a million people, what are the odds of a group of less than 10 people including a relative of someone I'd crossed paths with two years before?
Then, this morning, my sweetie tells me he had a similar small world occurrence at work this week. When we spoke to his mother over the weekend, she told us about a music event held just a block down the street from her home in a small town 100 miles away from here. She didn't go but it was well-attended by the locals. Turns out the MC for this event was in a small meeting at my sweetie's workplace this week.
I think our most amazing small world story comes from a vacation we took some years ago. We were living in Colorado at the time and planning to move back to Arizona. Before moving south again, I suggested we take a road trip to explore the Pacific Northwest. We loaded up the dogs and the camping gear and headed north. One of our stops was Yellowstone National Park. We camped outside the park in the little town of West Yellowstone. We'd been on the road for a while and needed to do laundry, so we found a little laundromat. We were the only ones there.
While waiting for the clothes to get clean, a man came in and started wiping down the machines. We got to visiting. I don't remember why, but he mentioned his wife came from a small town in Arizona - the town where I was born. We asked where he was from and he seemed to think we wouldn't be familiar with it because it was pretty small, too (population of less than 8,000 people). It was my sweetie's home town! The guy said he'd been good friends with a particular person there and wondered if my sweetie had known him. Well, of course he knew him - the person he mentioned was his cousin! Over a thousand miles from home and the one local person we run into has strong connections back to our home towns.
If you've had an interesting small world experience, feel free to share it in the comments.
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While in college, I lived in a six bedroom house, and had five housemates. One of them was doing post doctoral work. At the time, I was doing housecleaning for a couple. When I graduated, the couple and the post-doc friend met at my party for the first time, though they had stories about each other for several years. Three months later, the couple was vacationing in Edinburogh, Scotland. They're walking along through a garden, and a man approaches them-my post-doc housemate in Scotland for a conference! They looked at each other and simultaneously said my name aloud. They realised that they had met at my party, and all parties knew me. They decided to have lunch together. I did not know that the housemate was going to a conference, nor where the couple was going on vacation. Small world, huh? Nice that they all told me the story when they got back home.
This isn't really my story, but it's family and a good one...
My grandfather (he was 89 at the time) was visiting Disney World with my grandmother. My grandma was wheeling around in her wheelchair checking out all the sites (they were in the part where all the countries are represented). Anyway, my grandfather was sitting on a bench and another old man sat down next to him.
It turns out both of them are from Montana, a year apart in age, lived in neighboring po-dunk towns. As they talk, they realize they played against each other in high school basketball and even dated one of the same girls. How likely is it that these two almost 90-years olds from no-where Montana would meet? My grandpa (now 91) still talks about that visit and all the reminiscing they did.
I love that story!
On my first trip to Europe with my family, we saw three HS friends of my brother waiting for the same bus we were. Then a week later, in Switzerland, we saw my orchestra teacher and his wife at a dinner and music evening. I remember thinking how strange it was that my teacher was a "real" person with a wife and everything!
My honeymoon was an Alaskan cruise. While waiting for a special tour on the bridge, another passenger walked by, stopped, and came over to ask if I had grown up in Madison. Madison, SD, that is, which was a town of 6000. Turns out we had gone to school together for about 4 years. She had moved in 10th grade (while I had moved 4 years later). This was about 12 years after we had last seen each other. We never saw each other again on the cruise, just that one chance meeting. Oh, and she was on her honeymoon as well!
My mother once met someone she went to college with (in Colorado) on a street in Hong Kong. Both of them were tourists.
I met someone I had known in high school while walking along the Appalachian Trail. We were going in opposite directions and neither of our groups had seen anyone else that day.
Finally, while in college I wrote a check for a meal at a place called Sarge's and the guy taking it (presumably Sarge himself) recognized my last name as the name of the doctor who had delivered his daughter some 20 years before. Yep, my dad was an obstetrician in the Navy -- we have a somewhat unusual last name, so I'm sure it was my dad he was remembering.
Love all these stories. Thanks for sharing!
Heres one for you - my brothers two best friends met in the middle of France in a small town in the middle of nowhere. One was on furlough from the army (UN peace keeping forces in Israel at the time), the other was on his honeymoon and neither knew about the other.
We all grew up in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand in a town of just on 1000.
Pretty improbable I'd have said.
viv in nz
My best friend and I were in Munich vacationing in 2001 and we were headed into a beer garden. It was the Munich birthday festival when they close the streets and party for days. We stopped to talk to a woman there at the entrance and turns out, she spent time when she was younger in our town. We had a great visit, talking about all the things she remembered and updating her on everything that had changed since she'd been gone.
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