It's a small world after all

Yeah, I know it's one of the most-annoying rides at Disney.

Tonight at the bar, I started talking with this guy. We exchanged pleasantries and after I told him where I am from, he piqued an extra interest.

He told me a guy sent him an E-mail two years ago from my home state asking about an apartment he was sub-leasing in the town of my current stop. After a few minutes, I realized it was I that sent him the message on Craigslist wondering about the sub-lease.

I told him I found another place once I moved down here, but he still remembered the E-mail, since he hasn't met many people from my home state.

What experiences do you have where you've met someone by chance and it turned out to be a small world?

 

Just after my senior year of high school I had driven to a concert about an hour and a half away from home and because it was chilly I was wearing my track jacket.
On my way out of the show, a guy says to me "oh you're from Podunk? Do you know a teacher Mrs. So-So?"
I said "Yes, she was good, but I hear she got canned"
The guy replies "She's my mom"

 

Backstage at a Mudhoney/Supersuckers show I overheard a gal talking about Dallas bands from the mid-80s. We got to talking and it turned out we had been into the same bands and attended many of the same shows. The icing on the cake was that she had been the roommate of a friend of mine. I had been to their place numerous times and never crossed paths with her till ten-plus years later in Seattle.

 

When I was a 9-years-old, we lived in a tiny town called Savanna, Illinois. My family went on a cross-country road trip to visit my grandparents in Oregon, taking a very winding and scenic route to see most of tourist traps in the western half of the country.

We played mini-golf one night in Cody, Wyoming, and the couple behind us was from another tiny town just 10 miles away from Savanna.

 

My family crossed paths with a friend from my hometown and his family on a desolate hiking trail south of Asheville, N.C., over fall break in 2006. I had not seen him in two decades, maybe longer.

Neither one of us currently live within 300 miles of Asheville, N.C., and we grew up in a city near the Bama-Mississippi line. Both families were there doing the tourist thing.

 

Twenty years ago or so, am sitting down at the dining room table of my apartment in Ann Arbor eating breakfast.
look out the window and see my roommate getting out of the car after church -- instead of coming in he's waiting.
A car pulls up and another couple get out. I've golfed witht he other guy before, it's a buddy of my roomie's from his home town.
The girl was someone I dated in high school.
Can't tell you how I felt, not because of the old flame emotions. Nope, it was old flame emotions plus she was about to walk into the apartment with a guy after going to church and I was sitting at the dining room table in t-shirt and shorts and mildly hungover and unshaved....

 

I had one while working on a story a few months back. A little backstory: I went to a Catholic high school where my mom worked as the baker in the school cafeteria and made chocolate chip cookies that people still talk about some 20 years later. Anyway, I'm contacting the director of the local museum for an article on a tax levy that's on the ballot. I get him on the phone and we say hello, do a little small talk and then he says "Where are you from?" I tell him and he then proceeds to say "Oh, yeah! I hear your mom makes the greatest chocolate chip cookies!" I'm suddenly running his name (and variations thereof) through my brainbank trying to remember if he went to my school. He didn't, though it turns out his assistant did. She saw my name on his call list, told him to mention that and freak me out.
It worked.

 

I met a guy in Thailand who is from the town next door to mine. We both frequented the same bars.

 

In bed with this chick I picked up at the bar, making small talk after hot sticky action. Somehow conversation turns to her being adopted. To make a long story short: I banged my own sister!

We laughed and laughed. Crazy world.

 

Crazy story, I just forwarded it to Furman Bisher.

 

I might've told this story before.

I was flying up to the Bay Area to visit my sister and her family and see a Giants game, tickets for which I'd bought months earlier. It was when Southwest still had the rear-facing seats in the first row. I sat in the second row, facing a couple about my age. We didn't talk at all on the flight to Oakland.

My sister picked me up, we went to her house for a while, then drove down to the 'stick for the game. We're sitting in the seats I'd bought, again, months ago, when the couple from the Southwest flight sat down right behind us. We started talking and it took a while to explain to my sister how I knew these random people at the Giants game.