"Small World" Story of the YEAR

[Dan T.]

Wow. Amazing chance encounter on the DC Metro. What's your "small world" story?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093001537.html

It was a Wednesday night. I'd met my husband for dinner downtown, and we boarded the train at Metro Center to head home. As he checked e-mails on his BlackBerry, I checked out the people around us. In front of us sat a young man wearing a baseball cap, a T-shirt, jeans and an iPod. He stood to offer two young women his seat. They declined. Nice guy, I thought. As he sat back down, I noticed "University of Kansas" on his cap.

Perfect, I thought. My family was planning to celebrate part of my mother's 80th birthday by taking her back to KU, from which she graduated in 1948. I wanted to take her to a good restaurant there, so why not ask this guy in the Kansas cap if he knows of any?

"Excuse me," I said, tapping his shoulder. He took out his earphone and turned to me. I pointed to his cap. "Do you know any good restaurants in Lawrence?"

"Hmmm, Lawrence," he said. "I didn't go to school there. My dad did his residency at KU Med Center, but it's in Kansas City."

"Oh, sure," I said. "I know where it is. I grew up in Kansas City."

"Me, too," he said.

"Oh, really!" I said and nudged my husband to make sure he had heard this "small world" discovery. "What part did you grow up in?"

"An area called Brookside," he said.

Me, too!" I said. "What street?"

"67th Terrace and Pennsylvania," he said.

"Wow. I grew up near the same corner!" I exclaimed. I nudged my husband a little harder. He put away his BlackBerry with a smile and nodded yes, what a small world. I imagine now that at least a few people looked up from their books or their BlackBerrys, wondering why a woman was raising her voice on the Metro.

"What was your address?" I asked.

"604 West 67th Terrace," he replied.

My mouth dropped open. A few seconds of stunned silence.

Loudly, against all protocol on the Washington subway, I cried, "You grew up at 604 West 67th Terrace? I grew up at 604 West 67th Terrace!"

Was this guy for real? I must have looked and sounded like I didn't believe him, because he proceeded to describe the house to a T.

Yes, it was the same house. He knew the family across the street that has lived there since I was a kid. I moved to Washington in 1985. His parents bought the house from mine in 1986.

And then, as if this one-in-a-million chance of meeting was not enough, he said, "My room was upstairs in the back, with the green shag carpeting."

Loud gasp. I started bouncing with excitement in my seat, off my husband, off the window. "That was my room! Mine was the room with the green shag carpeting! You grew up in my room." The three of us looked at each other in disbelief.

I called my mom when I got home, and she called our old neighbors from across the street. They couldn't believe it either, as they looked out their window at the childhood home of two people who ride the Washington subway and just happened to meet one night.

On the Metro, few people speak. Maybe they should.

-- Joy Bates Boyle, Washington

The fellow who for literary reasons goes unnamed in the story above is Joel Barr. He shared the details of this incident with a statistician, who somehow calculated that winning a lottery jackpot was more likely than this sort of encounter.

[hokie4redskins]

That's awesome. It's always amazing to me how truly small this world is. I used to ride the metro and always found the silence eerily strange.

[The Brave Little Toaster Oven]

Wow, that is amazing.

When I was in Maine, I ran into a youth leader I had when I was a kid at the airport and we rode the same plane. I just saw him again when I was walking around my college campus and had to say something.

[Dan T.]

My aunt, from Iowa was on a trip to France, sitting at a table up in the Eiffel Tower, and right next to her was a group of young guys, one of whom, as it turns out, she taught in Sunday school back in Iowa.

[Kilmer17]

I was on a golf trip in Myrtle beach about 10 years ago. While we were wating to tee off on the first tee, I started talking to the 4some playing behind us.

Turns out one of the guys was from Martinsburg WVA, where my dad grew up. I asked what street, and he said Virgina Ave, which was of course, where my dad grew up. So we had a good laugh and he said he had run into my dad at Shepperd College a few years after HS and introduced him to his girlfriends roommate. Who of course turned out to be my mom.

So basically, I ran into the guy who was responsible for my existence.

[sjinhan]

My father went golfing few years back and got paired up with a stranger. They got talking and realized that they were schoolmates in Junior High and High School about 40 years ago in small town in Korea. They did not know each other during school because my father was poor and was in the "dropped out" crowd who decided to start working and the stranger was the son of rich family in town so continued his studies and he went on to become a famous professor who held major goverment positions and wrote many books in Korea. But this day after 40 years, they met at a golf course in Virginia.