I went to college with a great guy named Tim. He was one of those people who's good friends with some of your good friends, who you see a lot, and with whom you definitely get along well but you never really quite become close friends yourselves.
After college Tim moved to St. Louis to get a Ph.D. in math. I moved with some of my closest friends to Minneapolis. One day I came home from work and there was Tim in my living room, visiting my friend/roommate Anne. I hadn't seen him in a couple years, and it was fun to hear about his adventures in math grad school (which involves more adventures than you'd think, apparently) and his recent decision to leave his grad program and pursue his other passion, jazz music.
Fast forward a couple years. I'm visiting a friend who is in law school at Northwestern, and while she's in class (with someone I shared a house with one summer in college, coincidentally) I wander down the street and find a coffee shop to sit in. Northwestern happens to be right dow the street from the New England Conservatory. Who walks in to the coffee shop? You guessed it - Tim, along with his visiting-from-St. Louis girlfriend. We hug and chat. I tell them that I'm rarely in Boston but I do come to western Mass. all the time to contra dance. His girlfriend, who seems awesome, loves to contra dance and has dragged Tim once or twice, though he's much more of a swing dancer.
Fast forward to last night. I'm in Concord, MA at the Scout House. (Side note: I'd never been there before; it's a lovely hall with a beeeeeeautiful floor, and - last night - an equally beautiful band. Uber-fun.) I'm in the midst of balancing and swinging my neighbor, and who do I see in the next line? You guessed it. I shout "Tim!" and he calls back "yes! I saw you!" and after that dance we hug and chat, this time while waltzing.
And then as I am talking to him during the break, many many people I know and love from dancing out in western MA come up and say hi to him. They're all friends. And then someone comes up and gives him a hug and turns to me and says "are you Rachel? Do you know Chanel?" Chanel is a girl she went to college with at Oberlin, with whom I became friends in the last few months before I left New York City when she came to work at Columbia/Barnard Hillel.
This is the sound of my world shrinking, in a fabulous way.
Did I mention that last weekend my parents and I discovered that the sister of a family friend of ours from home in central Illinois, who we had heard lives somewhere around Brattleboro, is - I kid you not - my next-door neighbor? Even better, I'd met her for the first time just that morning because she was having a tag sale (weird New Englanders call them tag sales, not yard or garage sales). I'd bought a rug and a book and a hat from her. Funny how it didn't come up that her sister has known me since my birth.
There are so many stories like these: Running into a childhood friend from Normal, IL while he's studying abroad in Buenos Aires and I'm visiting one of my best friends from college while she's there doing the same thing. Becoming friends with the roommate of a friend in California (actually the same Anne who Tim was visiting when we lived together in Minneapolis), then finding out that over a decade ago he was good friends with my good friend in Massachusetts, when they both worked at a camp in Maine.
What I wonder is how often we don't even discover the connections. That's why I try to always mention names in stories, because you never know when someone will connect the dots and say "oh, you grew up down the street from so-and-so? That's funny, I met her in a bar in Barcelona and we ended up traveling around Spain together" or some such randomness.
What a wonderful big small world it is, huh?
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6 comments:
Great story! The world should be small~!
Permission to add to your list? A new (at the time) co-worker and I discover we are going to the same college graduation 1,500 miles away, a school with maybe 2,000 students, and yes, her daughter knows you.
I won't even start with my list.
Yeah, and I didn't even mention the fact that I Freecycled my box spring to someone who turned out to work at the same place I do, and whose husband turned out to be from the same tiny town in rural southwestern North Dakota as the woman who caused my crazy car accident two years ago. I've been through his town. They probably know each other.
Okay, here I go. I was assigned at random a college roommate. I found out before school she was from Oregon and had lived there her entire life. Standing in line waiting to check in and get the key we realize we are standing next to each other. That's not the good part. Turns out her uncle is a lawyer, in the midwest, and actually worked for my dad in his law office in my hometown, in Iowa, town of 1,500 people!
Whoa! I never knew that story!
So, two girls grow up a mile apart in central Illinois. Although they have a lot of the same friends, went to some of the same theater events, and went to the same birthday parties when they were kids, they never met. Fast forward 18 years--the two girls independently apply to the same tiny, liberal arts college 500 miles away from where they grew up. Not only do they both decide to go, but they both pick the same first-year class on film, and they are put in the same dorm and on the same floor. They become fast friends and keep in touch for years. I know a story like this could never happen, but it is kind of fun to imagine...
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