In another thread a few days ago, several of us shared some weird coincidences in the “tell me somethin’ good” thread (please feel free to repost them here, @sherpa, @Colorado_mom, @njboymom,@HImom, @DramaMama2021 , @toledo). It just happened again today: will post my recent one below. Please share your “small world” stories!
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I made a last minute decision to attend my significant (year) college reunion. I trashed my college t-shirts long ago, but bought one a few years back. Thought maybe I’d look for one on line and 2 “vintage” shirts showed up on poshmark (I have never shopped on poshmark). One seller lives in in the town I grew up in, and the other in the town I am going to for a wedding at the end of the summer. What are the odds?? Small world!!
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We were vacationing at Iguaçu Falls on the Brazilian side earlier this week, and while at breakfast at our hotel, I saw another guest wearing a Hollins T-shirt. I graduated from Hollins over forty years ago (she much more recently) and rarely encounter another alumna in my daily life, much less 5,000 miles away!
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My story happened over 35 years ago. My husband and I visited Cooperstown as part of a vacation. We just walked through town as we were staying elsewhere. A month later, I attended a 10 year HS reunion event (just 12 people). Two of the attendees mentioned having been in Cooperstown the same weekend we were (it was Hall of Fame Weekend so we knew it was the same weekend.)
This was back in the day of sending film to be developed. I got my pictures back and it included pictures from the reunion and also our upstate NY vacation. I look at the picture my husband took of me in Cooperstown and there clear as day are the 2 friends we knew from HS walking down the street right behind me (my husband knew them also).
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The college shirt saga continues. My husband was hiking in Arizona in March, when he noticed a couple wearing an Ohio State Univ shirt and a Univ of MI shirt. Because we’re from Toledo, he commented on the unusual combination. It turns out one of the women grew up on the street next to us and we had mutual friends. The next thing I knew, we were at their house having cocktails.
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I ran into my AP calc teacher randomly in London when I was traveling years ago with friends.
My FIL’s second wife sent me a condolence card 10+ years before she ever met FIL because she heard about the loss of our child through a mutual work colleague. I came across it in our son’s memory box about 5 years after they were married and thought I had accidentally put a card in the wrong place.
My H’s was doing an M&A deal where he discovered that he and the CEO of the other company grew up in the same small town and went to the same HS (and overlapped)!
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I attended a pharmaceutical dinner and happened to sit next to the speaker in Hawaii. A few weeks later, we are both speakers at a competitor’s pharmaceutical photo shoot at a national conference in SF. I found that fairly amazing.
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Also a friend from middle school in HI and I and our families decided to travel to DC together one summer. While there, who should we run into TWICE but another friend we both know from middle school and girl scouts with her family. My friends live in NM and CA.
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S23 brought his GF home. He just so happens to work for her dad. They started talking about her father and I asked what he does. Once they explained it, it sounded exactly like one of the poeple in a (non-fiction) book I was reading. Then, I put it together that it was also the same last name. I ran up to get the book and show it to her. Sure enough, it was her dad.
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Mine is from 2007 and I have told this story many times.
My father died in 2007. He had a silly sense of humor and liked to make faces out of the potatoes he peeled for dinner while we were gathered in the kitchen. He’d also put rocks out in the yard with a grandchild’s name and smiley face on it, then take the grandchild for a walk in the yard, and mysteriously find a rock with their name on it!
After we came home from his funeral, I was making some scrambled eggs for and with my youngest daughter. She handed me an egg from the carton, but I rejected it because it looked weirdly mottled, and told her to put it back in the carton for the moment. She did so, and then said “Mommy, look! A smiley face!” Sure enough, there was a distinct smiley face on the egg.
I kept that egg, and blew the contents out hoping to preserve the face, but as it dried, the face disappeared. I even tried putting some black paint inside to see if that would work, but it didn’t. I still kept the egg, but wondered how to keep it safe.
Not long after, I got a call from Operation Smile, an organization I had volunteered with previously, to see if I’d be willing to go on a mission with them to Ürümqi, China. Due to my dad’s recent death, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect, but as my girls were adopted from China and I loved my time spent there, I agreed to go.
While there, I met several of the Chinese volunteers including a local young nurse. Although neither of us spoke each other’s language, we bonded, especially since we had young daughters about the same age. I gave her daughter a coloring book of Chinese peasant paintings I had created (ex. take the spaces out of https://www.e t s y .com/listing/1704928998/jinshan-peasant-painting-river-village).
A couple of days later, she hands me a reciprocal gift, tells me it is from her birth province, and quickly left to go back to work. I was with several young Chinese folks who spoke excellent English; they were volunteers from the Shanghai branch of KPMG. I open the gift and immediately burst out crying. It was a decorative egg holder. My companions were concerned for me understandably, and through my tears, I explained to them the story of my father’s death and the egg. Someone went to get my new friend, explained the story again to her, and soon we were all hugging and crying happy/bittersweet tears, even the young men in the group. The gift could not have been more perfect.
I have it and the egg in my display case of my most treasured items in my home. I always wonder if it was really just a coincidence.
*I still have all the rocks found in the yard too.
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When I started dating my husband 42 years ago (we were 27) he asked me to go with him to his 10 year high school reunion in Mississippi. We lived in Dallas at the time. We stayed at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis (his MS town was a suburb of Memphis) and at dinner he introduced me to his best friend and college roomate. As I reached out to shake hands he said OMG you’re XXX XXX! He stated my full maiden name. I was shocked. I had never been to Mississippi nor Tennessee, who is this guy and how does he know me? Apparently, we were in the same 7th grade class in Washington DC! When I was 12! I could not remember a single person from that year as it was the one and only year we lived there - both our dads worked at the Pentagon. His dad was a colonel in the Army and my dad was a Colonel in the Air Force. Small World! I honestly do not remember people well, maybe because we moved every 2 years.
As far as college logos go - we’ve been on vacations in distant lands and hear “War Eagle” at least once either at the foreign airport or on a tour or in a hotel. Those Auburn alumns get around!
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There is an addition to the coincidence that I mentioned in the other thread:
In addition to running into 2 friends (both in my same profession) on the front steps of our hotel in Singapore earlier this year (and these friends live in the same building as the friends we were traveling with), other friends we see every month at a group dining event were apparently boarding the very same cruise ship we just left, for they very same cruise (in reverse) that we just took!
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We moved to our neighborhood 20ish years ago. We moved from a neighborhood of maybe 250 homes.
Our “new” (to us) neighborhood has less than 500 homes. When we met some of the people on our street, we found out they had moved from our old neighborhood, maybe 20 years before. Then we found out we had 3 (or maybe it was three including us) couples who moved from the old neighborhood to the same “block” of the new neighborhood.
(And, just another weird coincidence, when one of those couples moved to another neighborhood in another state, they moved to the same neighborhood my boss owned a home in).
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Just remembered another one I’ve posted before.
My current husband and I were both married to our first spouses in 1987. When we were preparing to move from our “old” house to the “new” one, he found the wedding album from his first wedding. We looked at it.
His first wife and I wore the same dress to our first weddings! Hers was white and mine was ivory, but other than that, it was the same.
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I was born in California, but lived in two other states before our family moved overseas when I was 5, when my father took a job with USAID. While there a war broke out and we were evacuated to another city, and moved in with another family temporarily until housing could be secured.
This family had a teenage daughter and one night her boyfriend and his parents came over for dinner. As the parents chatted, turns out the boyfriend’s parents had lived in the same city as my parents several years prior. Boyfriend’s father was a medical doctor. A little more discussion and they realized the boyfriend’s father was an OBGYN who had delivered me!
I was 10 years old and was horribly embarrassed that he had seen me naked.
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My parents were moving and selling some furniture. My sibling was meeting a potential buyer at my parents’ house.
The buyer noticed a resort sticker on my sibling’s car and asked about. It turns out that the buyer’s parents are my parents’ neighbors at their vacation home 2 hours away.
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D’s HS friend and family were going to Paris the same week would be there for vacation. We jokingly said “see you there!”
We were on the train to Versailles and the train stopped for less than a minute along the way. Doors swung open (we were right by the door) and there stood her friend! We waved and the doors shut almost immediately and the train moved on. Crazy!
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H and I went to a very small college. When we were younger, we seemed to run into former classmates and profs everywhere we went … a rest stop on the highway, a McDonald’s in a state several hours away, an art museum in Toronto, and even at the Masters golf tournament. The sightings have waned over the years, but judging from the pictures I see in our alumni magazine, that may be because the passage of time has made our former classmates (and us, I’m sure) more difficult to recognize!
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We were staying at a hotel in Boston to visit my daughter. I press the elevator button and when it opens a book club friend from NJ is standing in it with her family. Although she had a kid living n Boston, she had never stayed at that hotel before.
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I grew up knowing several of my 2nd cousins, we lived less than 20 miles apart and our mothers were close, so we saw each other often as kids.
Fast forward maybe 15 years to when my kids were very young. I had not seen these cousins for years. I was driving alone from my parents home in Iowa to my in laws house in Indiana with my two kids, probably 6 and 1 at the time. We stopped at a random McDonalds in central Illinois for a bathroom break. I literally bumped into one of these cousins as I opened the door to leave the building. We looked at each other quizzically and both said HEY I know you! at the same time. She was travelling, also, and had no ties to that area.
We did not see each other again after that until last October when we were both at a family reunion. We both remembered that McDonalds. 
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