Six degrees of separation

Well, I have a friend who ran into another friend in line for one of the egyptian pyramids...

ps, ci, I like your vacation fotos...

Off the top of my head, I was at a New Years' Eve party some years ago and there was a woman who looked so familiar to me. Both she and I were very good friends of the hostess. We went through the school list and work list but nothing clicked until I mentioned that she looked so much like my brothers' old girlfriend from eighteen years previous. Turned out, she was the younger sister of my brothers' old girlfriend and she and her friend, the hostess of the party who I had known for at least five years at that point, knew my brother and had watched him court her sister when they were little girls.

Just the other night I ran into a distant cousin of mime at one of our local stores. My cousin lives in the same town in Mass that I lived in before we moved to Canada. We lost our power that night and I went to the store at about 10:30 PM to get some lamp oil and there he was. It's strange when you run into someone you know that lives so far away.

I've had two such incidents - one happy and one sad.

When I was in 8th and 9th grade we lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area. One of my friends was Rick, and he had a younger sister named Julie. About the only thing I remembered about Julie was during one of the rare snowfalls in Seattle we were having a snowball fight, and she brained me with an iceball.

Fast forward 30 years. We're living in a company compound in Saudi Arabia. Our family is at the non-denominational church service inside the camp on Friday morning (weekends here are Thursday and Friday) and there's an elderly gentleman I've never seen before there. I introduce myself, and he says his name is the same as my old friend Rick. I comment on that, and it turns out the elderly gentleman is Rick's father. He's here in Sandland visiting his daughter (Julie) who is married - both Julie and her husband are math teachers at the company school in the compound.

For the sad incident - about seven years ago a Saudi jetliner had a collision with a Russian jetliner over India, killing everyone on both airplanes. There were only two Americans on the Saudia flight. One of them was a friend of ours from our compound. A few months later we were in St. Petersberg, Florida looking at a possible boarding school for our oldest son (the company schools here only go through 9th grade. After that you have to go out to boarding school). About 2 AM that night our youngest son (8 at the time) woke up with a horrible earache - so bad the missus decided we had to take him to see a doctor then and there. We located a local hospital and took him on in. My wife went with our son to the examination room, and I started filling out paperwork with the nurse up front. When the nurse saw what insurance we had and who I worked for, she asked if I knew the American who died in the recent airline collision, but gave a different name than our friend. It turns out that the other American who died was a nurse, had worked in that same hospital and was a good froend of the nurse I was talking to. Some years before she heard the same siren's song I did, and went to work in Sandland, and took a vacation in India.

Synchronicity -- Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related, conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as causality.


I love these experiences. The latest for me: I work at a restaurant that attracts many different types of people -- rich, homeless, educated, illiterate, etc. A man showed up one day talking about complete nonsense -- we all thought he was tripping on acid or something, because he was talking about things that weren't really there and just speaking in sentences that didn't make sense. But, he was incredibly entertaining, as he chased the cottonwood seed that blew through the air and laughed as he told us weird, non-sensical stories. My friend took the time to have a soda with him after work and after a while found out that he wasn't tripping, he was schitzophrenic.

She then found out that he graduated from high school with me and worked at one time at my husband's employer (where I once worked and where the guy's father still works). Kinda weird!

This one was spooky. Remember the day trader in Atlanta about 3/4 years ago who murdered his wife and two children and then went to the place where he traded and began shooting? He wounded and killed several people. Turns out, his poor wife worked at the same small company as my husband and he had seen this guy several times come to pick to pick her up. She had been out of the office, without notice, for a couple of days prior to his rampage and of course no one knew that he had already murdered her.

I wish we had an emoticon for the Twilight Zone theme,

Do do do do
Do do do do

oooooo...I'm getting shivers!

In São Paulo, one of teh largest cities in teh world, the same man attempted to rob me three times over a year. Each time was if very different locations.

It was actually quite funny.

"Give me your money!"

"Again!!! Will you ever quit? This is the second (and later third) time you are trying this!"

-And there are alot of people in Sao Paulo!

Hm.

A guy I went to high school with killed a little girl at a gas station. He wanted to know what it was like.

Didn't know him well. Thought of him again after Columbine, as he always wore a black trench coat.

When I lived in London, was walking along the Thames and ran into someone who looked familiar... another high school acquaintance. (My high school was big, but not THAT big.)

About 3 degrees of separation, at most, with anyone in the deaf world -- my friend went to school with Marlee Matlin, another friend worked with Christy Smith ("Survivor".)

The small world concept has interesting stories. When my dad was training for wwii, he told me about being on an army post in New Mexico - Fort Huachuaca. He said he was walking across the parade grounds with a group of guys when he hears a familiar voice in another group of guys who are also crossing. It was his brother, Jack from LA, whom he'd not seen for over a year and didn't even know had joined the army. It was a nice moment for them (and for the other guys who were also very surprised). They had a meal together but not much more before they headed off on their separate assignments in England and France. They didn't meet again until after the war.

As it happened, years later, Mr. Piffka trained at that same fort for Viet Nam, which only intrudes upon this story because it wasn't until he mentioned being there at a family dinner that my dad happened to tell us the story of him & his brother.

My father passed his father (my grandfather) in a POW-camp in Belgium: the ladder sent home, father staying for three more years in France.
They hadn't seen for months - and it was the last time, they met in life.

Speaking of France: some decades ago, I met my sister in Paris: both of us didn't know, we would be there at that time, and we saw each other being in the same queue in a self-service restaurant.

Wow, Walter, those are amazing. I'm sorry about your grandfather, how heart-breaking they didn't get to see each other again under happier circumstances. Why did your father have to stay for three more years?

The story with your sister is a LOT happier. What a shocker. Did you sit together?

I was in a 50' sailboat crossing the English channel, getting seasick and chatting with a woman. We were both friends of the girlfriend of the guy who owned the boat but we had never met. She said she was a health sciences student and it turned out that a woman she was talking about, her mentor "Mary," was a woman who I also knew pretty well because she & her husband were longtime friends of my parents. We thought it was quite a coincidence to discover this connection while bobbing about in the midst of an ocean, thousands of miles away.

Well, my father was POW from March 1945 until May 1948 (guess my month of birth :wink: ) in France. Both were (origianally) American POW's.: grandfather sent home, father sent "to help" in the French and Allied Forces health system.

Since my sister was there with her college class, my friend and I showed them around (well, my friend cared about my sister, I 'guided' her [girl] friends).

February?

That was awfully nice of you & your friend to help those lovely damsels in distress find their way around Paris! On that sailboat adventure, we were headed to Paris. Maybe it is one of those synchronistic places!

the city of lights is more than "synchronistic." The magic is so powerful, many visit often after their first visit. c.i.

Didn't you get some sort of frequent victim discount? or your parking validated? Poor show.