Wait! What? Who Are You?
You never know who you are going to run into on any given day (or night), or how that run in will turn out.
For this particular interaction, file it under, ‘It’s a Small World’.
On Wednesday nights, I play trivia (more like Family Feud) with some friends at a bar in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.
We normally have four players (three men and a woman), but on this particular Wednesday we ended up with a fifth wheel. It was a woman we didn’t know, but was a friend of a friend, and needed a team to join since her team left mid-game (not sure why they did, but they did).
So that’s how this random woman ended up on our team. After a few rounds of questions, she introduced herself, and started a conversation with the only other woman on the team (our Captain).
I didn’t pay attention to their conversation, but my ears perked up when I heard the new woman say ‘the Ukrainian Church’.
Now, I’m not Ukrainian, but I do know of one Ukrainian Church. It was a church whose cemetery ran just the other side of the backyard fence of the house Arlene (future ex-wife) and I lived in where we raised our kids when we were married.
Then, she had my full attention when she named that exact street.
I literally spun around, “What did you just say?”
She repeated the name of the street.
I asked her the address and, although she looked confused by my insistents, she told me.
Now I was truly dumbfounded when I realized we had been neighbors back in the nineties.
Well, neighbors, yes and no.
Yes, she grew up in the house of the address she mentioned, but her and her sister moved out before Arlene and I moved in next door. By then, it was just her mom and her mom’s boyfriend in that house.
However, she and her sister would visit from time to time, and that’s how I knew her back in the nineties.
I told this woman that her mom and her boyfriend were the nicest couple, and great to have as neighbors.
For example, when our daughter Amanda was born her mom, who worked at Johnson & Johnson, came over with diapers and dozens of products that any first time parents would gratefully accept.
While I explained to the rest of the trivia team why I was excited to meet this woman (again), she disappeared, only to reappear with cell phone in hand.
“It’s my mom,” and handed me her phone.
For the next five minutes I stood outside on the bar’s patio, and talked to a woman I hadn’t seen, or spoken to, in over twenty-five years.
If that’s not the definition of a small world, I don’t know what is.
