When I was a young teen living in rural eastern South Dakota, my mom had to drive me sixty miles one way for my monthly orthodontist visits, which spanned nearly three years. Mr. Wordtabulous, also a young teen at the time, lived in western Minnesota and was driven fifty miles by his mom to the same orthodontist. It is easily within the realm of possibility that we awkwardly checked each other out in the waiting room thirty-plus years ago, long before we met in college. In 2004, we went to Italy and while we were in the small town of Vernazza, drinking wine on a cliff overlooking the Ligurian Sea, we struck up a conversation with a young American couple. Over pleasantries, we found out they were newlyweds and the bride was the daughter of our former orthodontist, roughly 4,800 miles from home.
My eighth grade English teacher read an essay I’d written about my feisty Aunt Phylis and realized that her first schoolgirl crush, twenty years before and 350 miles away,was my first cousin, Bruce.
Returning from our 2006 Germany/Austria trip, we had a short layover in Amsterdam. Standing in line to board the plane to the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, I began chatting with the people immediately behind me and discovered they live ten miles from our house.
It sometimes seems we live in a novel, with a finite list of characters engendering unlikely connections. We don’t know what threads exist between us and that stranger in the elevator, in the other lane, or in the news story taped on the other side of the globe. I take it as a cautionary tale against smugly assuming we know how things work, and a gentle nudge from the universe to remember that we are all neighbors. What coincidence have you experienced, and what is your take?
wordtabulous 