It’s a Small World
By: Keith
I put together a list of the top 125 dad blogs a few weeks ago. Perhaps half of the people on the list I know through commenting on their sites and e-mails. The rest I found tangentially. One person on the list however I know personally. I didn’t know who he was though when I added him to the list. I think I even commented on his site a few months ago without knowing who he was. It’s number 47 (Here Goes Everything – My Life as a Stay at Home Dad). He was a classmate of mine at Palos Verdes High School. We were on the cross country and track teams together. When I moved to Massachusetts I lost contact with him and never heard from him again. That was 19 years ago. Two weeks ago I got a message in my inbox saying he saw the e-mail announcement of him making the list that I sent him and saw, in my profile, that I went to PV High. He read the rest of my profile and said “Hey! That’s Keith!” It’s just one example of the world being not nearly as disparate and distant as we might think. I’ve had other small world experiences, too.
College: My freshman year at OU I lived in the dorms. My next door neighbor turned out to have been an acquaintance of mine when I lived in New Hampshire 10 years earlier. She was a ballet student who had also been in a commercial with me when we were both 9 years old.
High School: I went to a private boarding in Massachusetts for two years. My first day there I was approached by a girl who I did not recognize, but who knew me. She had gone to Kindergarten with me in Palos Verdes California, and she remembered me.
Mexico: I lived for a year in Mexico during college. I bumped into a High School classmate in Mexico City once by complete chance.
Those are a few of the more spectacular small world stories I’ve had. I think of my boys and the potential they will have for similar stories in their lives. We move frequently, and they meet a lot of people. The more we move the more likely we are to overlap people and geography to such an extent that small world stories will become more frequent as they age. I can’t think of any that they’ve had so far in their yet short lives. I’m sure they’ll come. How about you? Any interesting small world stories to tell? I’m curious because I know it can’t just be me who experiences these things.
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I was in Germany with my brother in 1997 and he ran into someone he knew. And a few weeks ago and my dad was in Greece and ran into someone he knew from a cruise a few years ago.
Small world indeed.
Also, I never knew you and Tasha were in a commercial together!!
Was that her name!
I totally forgot her name. To be honest, I forgot almost everyone’s name except for you and Roz.
Thought of another…
When I was managing an Applebee’s in Oklahoma about 6 months before I got married (2000) I was doing table visits (yuck!) and there was sitting a girl I hung out with in my Sr. year of high school in Maryland. We hadn’t talked in about 6 years and had no idea the other was living in the same town.
And… few years ago my brother started dating my boss’s sister. I worked at a bank in Texas and he lived in Oklahoma. They were set up by mutual friends of their own and figured out the connection on their first date while getting to know each other.
So are they really random encounters or is the universe telling us something?
It really is a small world…especially when you take social media into account. I find myself “bumping into” people all the time online…from my childhood, high school, college, etc.
P.S. Why does your family move so much? Does your wife have a job that requires frequent relocation?
.-= Stephanie´s last blog ..TOP 10 Blog Posts of 2009 =-.
Stephanie, My wife used to be a Construction Project manager and we’d move around the country following projects. These days we both work from home so we aren’t really tied to anywhere in particular.