It's a small world after all

I live in a small town, not tiny, but small - 15K in the city limits, 65K county wide. Obviously covering a whole lot of high school sports and being a life long resident, it seems like I know half of the population.

It seems like I can't go anywhere without running into someone. I'm not talking about going to the next town over to eat or something. I mean Vegas, Chicago, can't got to a Braves game or wherever without randomly bumping into someone. We were at the beach a couple of years ago in a rental house. Sure enough, dead across the street in another rental was someone from my home town.

It's never a meaningful long lost meeting or anything like that, just a "Hey, imagine seeing you here."

 

In July I moved across the country and happened to go to a church where my stepmother's aunt is the secretary, and one of the women in the congregation knows my aunt and uncle from years of living in Oklahoma.

I got assigned to shoot some golfers at local State U last month, and the only senior on the team is from my hometown.

Small, small world.

 

I grew up in New Jersey and went to college in Illinois and never went back. I get on facebook one night and a have two messages, one from a friend in high school and one in college wondering how I knew the other. It turned out they work with each other in NYC.

 

I think I've posted this here before, but what the hell. I went to the same college as my high school girlfriend's father. The summer after graduation, I'm talking to her mother in the kitchen and she asks what dorm I'm in. I tell her "Shithole" and she says, "Johnny (GF's father) was also in Shithole." She asks what room and I say "101". She tells me Johnny lived in 102. Fast forward to move-in day and I notice that my phone number is one number off from what they told me it was going to be, but think nothing of it. A few months later, I return from playing basketball to find maintenance workers switching the numbers on my room and another. Turns out they'd been switched at some point and it had just come to the school's attention.

The numbers that had been switched? 101 and 102. Although I wasn't assigned there, I wound up living in my ex-girlfriend's dad's old dorm room.

 

Did you ask her if she was into that?

 

Ha. We had broken up by the point I realized what was going on.

 

I have another. Just happened last week.

I'm assigned to photograph this, um, unique concert (accordion and hurdy gurdy among other instruments).

Anyway, I shoot the thing, walk out and a guy yells my name.

It's a guy I sat behind in 12th Grade English. He and I would talk NBA for hours. We were both junkies. He'd come to the high school games (I and one of his closest friends played).

He says he's been in this city, working for a liquor store (which is weird, 'cause the guy was pretty much deemed a genius in school) and that he's seen my name in the paper recently - guess he never read the sports section for college football/hoops (my old beats).

"I wondered if that was you," he said. "Now I know it is."

Small world.

We're gonna hook up for some beers and talk hoops.

 

I went to my 40-year high school reunion last Saturday. Talked with a girl who I haven't seen in 15 years (at the 25-year reunion). She was divorced from another good friend of mine.
On Saturday, we discovered that we live about 3 miles apart. Monday, I ran into her at Costco.

 

Arcade Fire concert?

 

No. Worse.

It was just plain bizarre. There was a guy playing a balloon. Yes, a balloon.