<p>For the past several days I’ve been staying w/ my mom in my hometown while my dad is out of the country. (Don’t get me started about why my father, at 80, thinks it’s a good idea to be gallivanting around Italy!!) At any rate, my mom, for health reasons, can’t do any long trips. My 2 brothers live in the same or the next town, so between the 3 of us, plus spouses, we’re “mom sitting.” I moved away from my hometown for my first job after college, and haven’t lived here since. I’ve obviously been back to visit a lot, and periodically see people from my past – but as the years go by, those “sighting” have become less and less frequent. But yesterday I felt as if I’d fallen into a time warp – or at least the Twilight Zone. I took my mom to a doctor’s appointment, and we ran into a neighbor from our old street, where my brothers and I grew up. (My parents moved to a different street about 25 years ago.) Then I saw a HS classmate, also at the doc’s office. After the appointment, we went to the drugstore to fill a prescription. While we were waiting for it, a woman came up to us and introduced herself to me as my 1st grade teacher!! OMG! (She said she recognized me, but since she was our back yard neighbor on our old street, she also recognized my mother.)</p>
<p>All in all, it was a plenty strange day. Anyone else w/ similar stories?</p>
<p>Not personally, but a few months ago my parents went to the church our family attended for 20 plus years. They moved away from the area about 20 years ago (gosh that makes me feel old). They said lots of people were coming up to them after church and talking with them. Mom said it was kind of strange because she didn’t recognize a few of them </p>
<p>I disliked my first grade teacher but adored my second grade teacher. (I even did some babysitting for her when I was older.) I sometimes wonder where she is now.</p>
<p>over the summer a lady came up to me at a restaurant and ask if I was ___'s mother. I said yes and apologized for not recognizing her. Turns out it was a preschool teacher from when he was 3-4 yo. She seemed a little shocked when I told her my S was finished his first year of college.</p>
<p>I guess not changing my hairstyle for 15 years got me recognized…</p>
<p>Not quite the same magnitude of time warp, but twilight-zonish… I lived with a family in France for the summer I was 17, and after I left them, went to Paris. I was having breakfast in the basement of a building when I ran into someone I’d done a dinner theater show with when I was in 8th grade. Was surprised to run into anyone I knew, however slightly, in Paris!</p>
<p>Many years after that, I was in Dresden for a concert (in it, not attending it), and as I walked along towards the SemperOper, I ran into a friend from high school on the street. </p>
<p>And not my sighting, but someone I was with… I know a lot of people from one particular subject-specific message board (not this one ), and one of the guys on the board moved from Lebanon to the DC area, so we’ve met up several times to chat and travel to nearby cities to see other board members. We went to NYC one day to meet up with another board member – went to museums and lunch and all. As the three of us were chatting and walking down 5th Avenue, suddenly one of us wasn’t there. I turned around, and there, about 10 paces back, was my Lebanese buddy, talking a mile a minute with someone… his college roommate from (and in) Lebanon. The guy had been walking up 5th as we were walking down. The former roommate was leaving the US the next day to go home; he was in the US for vacation. What were the chances of them meeting on the street in NYC?! Blew me away!</p>
<p>Right owlice, what are the chances? It’s become a standing joke in our family about my father running into people from his HS class in completely random places – on an hotel elevator on the other side of the country, at a rest stop on the NJ Turnpike, etc, etc.</p>
<p>We’ve had a lot of those chance meetings as well. My two favorites are:</p>
<p>1) While driving home from the Poconos, H and I ran into one of his clients at a roadside convenience store called Zinga’s Corn Patch. We felt like we were in the middle of nowhere at the time, so we definitely didn’t expect to find anyone we knew.</p>
<p>2) Back when D was 4 years old, we were walking through a shopping center in a nearby town, when I heard someone call my name. I looked up, and a guy in front of the drugstore (drugstore manager trainee) asked if I remembered him. I asked his name, and it was someone I had gone to elementary school with. He told me I looked and sounded exactly the same. Interesting and scary as I hadn’t seen him since I was 11 years old, and I was 9 months pregnant with my S during this encounter.</p>
<p>My H and I were in the garden of a pub in England. The only other customer
was an American woman. She asked if we were from ( name of town). It turned out she was a guidance counseler who had an office next to the GC of our troubled son during the one year we had lived there.</p>
<p>I was attending a HS performance of a play about two years ago, and during intermission a woman asked me if I had grown up in [hometown]. I said yes, and she asked if I was [my real name]. She was a year behind me and remembered me from sixth grade. She swore I hadn’t changed a bit. :)</p>
<p>Then there was the time my family and I were at the San Diego Zoo. We looked up and there were our across-the-street neighbors from Connecticut. Totally random – neither of us had any idea the other was going to San Diego!</p>
<p>A good number of years ago, my waiter at a NYC restaurant, turned out to be a coworker from the law firm at which we both had been associates. I felt so awkward about it. Since he did not call me by name, I also did not bring up the past. I did not tell my H about it until after we left the restaurant. H agreed with me, that it was better to avoid potential embarassment. All and all it was odd, since the restaurant was one that was often frequented by lawyers from that particular law firm. It would be one of the last places that I would want to work if I was in the table waiting business.</p>
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