It's a small world!

[Scary Terry]

Here's my wacky coincidence story. I'm now living with wife #2 in the Kansas City area -- but a dozen years or so ago, I had just moved with wife #1 to Minneapolis, from my boyhood home of Muscatine, IA -- a small river town on the Mississippi. A few weeks after the move -- having unpacked all our stuff and gotten settled in to our new place, we decided to treat ourselves to a night out.

We went to a club downtown where the retro swing band Royal Crown Revue was playing. We got there early, and headed upstairs to the balcony area and grabbed a table with a good view of the stage. Like all the tables, it was for four, and we were only two.  As the place filled up, we noticed another couple looking for a good spot to sit and having no luck. We waved them over and told them they were welcome to the other two chairs at our table. They expressed their gratitude and joined us.

We talked about the band a little and then noted that this was our first night on the town after having just moved to the city. They asked where we were from. "Iowa," I said.

"Really? Me, too," was the response of the male half of the couple. "What town?" he asked.

"Muscatine," I said.

"Really? Me, too!" He replied.

Turned out he was the younger brother of one of my high school classmates, and had moved to Minneapolis about five years prior.


Story #2 is that a couple years later, I was recruited by long-time comic book inker Barb Schulz to teach in the comic art program at MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design). On my first visit to the school, before touring the place or meeting anyone else, we had lunch in the cafeteria and discussed what all would be involved with teaching there. There were two other people in the cafeteria. Barb introduced me to one who was an instructor -- who was not only from Muscatine, but had gone to school with my long-time comics collaborator, Max Allan Collins -- and another, who was a student, was from, yes - you guessed it, Muscatine!

This is followed by the simpler Story #3, in which I was in line, waiting for an open teller window at my new Minneapolis bank, and looked to my right to see one of my Muscatine high school classmates in the line next to me.  He had moved to Minneapolis several years earlier and was selling cars at a nearby dealership.

Seems I could leave that town, but I couldn't completely escape it.

[McDougals House of Horror]

Walt would just love this "Small World" board game...

[Flower]

Things keep popping into my mind.

Once, many years ago a couple of months before I married the 'ex'  .. my father and I were in a local diner having brunch and heard the woman at the next booth was telling her friend about how her teenage daughter (not that I was much older) had just gotten a job working for my 'ex' and the woman started to chat away about how my 'ex' was so nice and about the business that he was running.  She didn't say anything out of order (some info was wrong) and I really liked her daughter but she would've been 'red faced' to know that I was at the next booth.

I've been brought up not to mention 'names' in public places and it's something that I've always been careful about .. my family had always 'nicknamed' people so not to get caught in the 'small world' .. 

[monsterphile]

When I graduated college in 1987, I took a guided bus tour of Europe through a company called Club Europa.  It was 10 countries in 3-1/2 weeks.  It was fast-paced tour, but one of the more relaxing parts was spending a few days on a little island called Hydra off of Greece.  This island is small and not a major tourist location at all.  While there, I ran into a girl  that went to high school with me.  It was surreal. 

Oddly enough, other people on the tour also ran into people they knew in various major cities in Europe. 

Rob

[Flower]

Rob's story reminds me of something that my friend A had told me.  A is a writer and is an unique person, she mainly travels  to very very off the beaten path tiny villages and towns that no one's ever heard of or would be motivated to visit in Europe, Africa or Asia.  At some point A put a personal ad in a newspaper and connected with her now husband.  M is her first and only husband as far as I know but A is his 5th wife. The trips continued as this is something that both she and M have in common .. on one of their trips, they decided to go to an out of the way place where neither of them had ever been before and ran into M's 3rd or 4th ex-wife.

Small world.

[ChrisW]

Hey Hepcat, I'm Lithuanian as well, what a small world! 
I've never visited Lithuania but would like to. My dad's parents were first generation Lithuanian, but I wasn't near to them and never learned the language. I don't have verified confirmation but based on circumstantial evidence I believe they were from Papeciai, west of Vilnius.

[Hepcat]

Cool! Are you an ardent fan of the Lithuanian basketball team?

 

Look at the video I just found about Papėčiai:

Virtualus Papėčių turas / Virtual Tour of Papeciai, Lithuania

I guess it's a rural township.

 

[Flower]

I keep forgetting about this one.

I was friends with R and hung out at her house a lot.  Her family (the 'L' family in this story) was very good friends with other neighbors and both the 'A' family and the 'L' family had moved to our area together from another town. A year or so after I met R and the L family .. the A family moved to another state approximately 1,500 miles Southwest of us.  Over the years, the A family and their daughter J would come and stay at the L family's home.  Some years R & the L family would visit the A family.

Time marched on, all the L family moved to the 'waiting for death' State known as F but I kept in touch with R and we would phone or write from time to time.  At this point, I was still married to the 'Ex' and he had accepted a retail management job in the same city where the As had moved.  I told my 'Ex' that I knew one person called J in the city and that after we unpacked and got settled, that I would contact R to get J's information.

My 'Ex' went to work and the first person who walked in the door was a young woman .. they chatted for a bit and she told the 'Ex' that she liked his accent and asked where he grew up. YOU GUESSED IT!  That woman was 'J' .. we got together once or twice and would bump into each other every now and again but we weren't ever really friends but friends of the same people.

Small world.

[jimm]

Once we had these annoying neighbors, went far away for a vacation at the lake weekend. Who shows up loud and loaded, the annoying neighbors. Not always a good thing LOL

[Flower]

I agree that 'small world' is not always good.  I've known cases of people who had no use for each other showing up at the same wedding or restaurant.

I was surfing the web when I googled someone who said that his original last name as K and that his family had changed there name to Something else.  My last name is Something and was changed from K.  I thought about this for months as M is fairly famous .. When I did email him, I wrote all that I knew of the K family including that my grandfather had a set of twin brothers with red hair who were furriers and came from a large family .. I expected not to hear from M or for him to blow me off, thinking that I was after money or pulling a fraud ..

M replied in less than an hour .. his grandfather 'W' was one of the twins and that our other cousin 'B' had come across the website a few months earlier .. long story short is that I talk to M and B all the time.  B and I are putting together family information and I've not only found B & M but other cousins.

We all are sadden by the fact that our family drifted apart before we were born but elated that we are gathering who we can find and searching for others.  B & M and I are all second cousins and are enjoying the family connection.

The small world can be both a plus or a minus.

[ChrisW]

Cool! Are you an ardent fan of the Lithuanian basketball team?

 

Look at the video I just found about Papėčiai:

Virtualus Papėčių turas / Virtual Tour of Papeciai, Lithuania

I guess it's a rural township.

I cheer them in during the Olympics. And thanks for posting that video! As you said, a rural area, could be any of a number of areas in the U.S.

[Hepcat]

This one wasn't as shocking geographically, but was still a bit of a surprise.

I've known Fred for over a decade and he joined the small firm for which I work just over two years ago. His office is almost directly across the hall from mine here at work. So taking the train to Stratford on a Saturday morning last summer but who do we see manning the Traveller's Aid booth at Union Station but Fred! It seems he's been volunteering with the organization for a number of years now.

 

[Hepcat]

So three years ago we had trekked up to Bala on the Moon River at the western edge of Lake Muskoka for the annual Cranberry Festival in October which marks the end of the summer tourist season.



Bala is home to Don's Bakery which is over-the-top fabulous and the best bakery I can remember visiting anywhere in North America. We were drooling over the wares at Don's trying to decide how much pastry we could take back with us to Toronto when an older gentleman hailed me. It was Dick L. whom I had visited at his office in Toronto a couple of times when he was the president of Campbell Resources back in 1982-83. He told me he had a cottage not far from Bala.

Not as wildly impressive geographically as some of the other stories in this thread, but I still thought it was pretty cool to run into Dick in tiny Bala after so many years.

 

[Flower]

After having two of our cats cross the Rainbow Bridge,  I was speaking to someone who told me that she felt that when one cat passed, that its soul would pass on to another kitten being born.  It is not really something that I believed but since it was nine weeks or so since the crossing, I decided that looking for a kitten born around that time won't hurt.

I said nothing to VJ and started to surf the web.  I came across a blog of a wonderful amazing woman named Robin who rescues and cares for ferals in our area.  I had taken in feral kittens in the past and wondered if Robin could give me a lead on kittens available for adoption.

Robin has just posted about a woman named Val who had reached out to her about a feral cat that was living in her backyard. Val named this beautiful gray fluffy cat, Princess.  Robin gave Val the trap and instructed her how it worked.  Val trapped Princess with ease and Robin picked her up and took her to the Humane Society to be spay.  The plan was that Princess would be spayed, recover at Raven's house and then released back in Val's backyard if she proved to be too feral to adapt to indoor life.

Princess was to be the last spay/neuter of the day and had a tarp over her cage to keep her calm.  When it was her turn, they took off the tarp off her cage  to discover that she'd given birth to three healthy kittens.  Raven took them in to foster.  I decided to follow Robin's blog but said nothing to VJ about my desire for a kitten or about Robin.

The next day, VJ forwarded me an email that he received from his friend's girlfriend (now wife) named Val.  RD and Val knew about the Rainbow Bridge crossing and had made a donation to a local shelter to honor our cats.  It seemed that Val had a cat named Princess who had kittens and wanted to know if we wanted one.

WTF!  It couldn't be the same kittens that I was following.  After some confusion about the location of Princess and the kittens. It was one and the same.  After jumping through a few unexpected hoops, we took little S home  when she was ready.  Unfortunately, Princess was too feral and was returned to Val, who bought her a heated cat house, which other ferals used but not Princess.

It's a small world 

[Flower]

I found out about six months or so ago that Mars Attacks is working in the same town/hamlet where I grew up.