It's a small world after all

Wes and I were having breakfast Monday morning at The Original Pancake House just a few blocks from here in honor of our wedding anniversary (it's become a tradition, granted only by virtue of doing it again this year). We were sitting in the outdoor patio, which has about 5-7 tables in it, looking over the menu and chatting about his Sunday shift at the Evanston ED. Out of the blue, a guy walked over to our table and said hi, and I suddenly realized it was the 12th grade Humanities teacher at the school were I'm starting in the fall -- and the person with whom I was to meet a few hours later! Mind you, I'd met this guy once, and this was our first meeting at the school. It was so random. He lives miles south of this place and just happened to be meeting a friend from out of town who was visiting another friend in Wrigleyville, and TOPH was a good in-between point. Granted, we both live in Chicago, but this is not a small town. And again, we've probably never intersected like this before -- just on the day we were supposed to meet.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened, mind you. My sister visited last summer from Tallahassee, FL, -- her first time in the city -- and ran into someone she knew on Michigan Avenue, probably the busiest street in Chicago, especially in the summer on a weekend. This is when I didn't even know anyone in the city, and here she was bumping into an old friend (though perhaps that says more about the sheer number of people she has befriended and less about the point I'm trying to make). While working for a test prep company this past year, I taught two people that live in my relatively small building. One of them was my next door neighbor.

The one that tops the cake, though, is a chance meeting that occured in Venice, Italy, while Wes and I were abroad right after college graduation. We boarded a water taxi headed for Murano or Burano. Wes turned around and saw his chem lab partner from Davidson. You've got to be kidding me here.

I guess Disney had it right.