So It Goes: strangers, friends

I have been experiencing that spooky connection between strangers a lot.  The most recent was at the Australia Day presentation, where I was seated between two strangers. Turn left to stranger number one (a finalist in the awards) and it turned out I used to date his brother when I was at high school.  Turn right to stranger number two and he had attended the same meeting that I had that very afternoon.  We also knew about a trillion people in common.

I put it down to a Redlands thing.  The curious notion that both of us might one day live and ultimately meet is something  we Redlanders expect.

And then, I met Geoff.  I bumped into Geoff while on holidays in Papua New Guinea . Within minutes, I discovered that he worked with my cousin and her husband. He said he was from the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, so I asked if he had ever come across my cousin, who also lives on the Peninsula. He hadn’t just met them.  He worked with them.

When you find out this sort of stuff, it is a bit of a cha-ching moment.  Throw a funeral into the mix and it becomes cha-ching with a bit of spooky-dooky.

There I was, fresh home from PNG, the room awash with blasts from my past.  The funeral was for a close family friend of my mother and grandmother, someone I had known since birth.  And while there were the usual suspects, there were also plenty of  people there as yet unmet.

The allure of the view drew myself and one woman together.  And those bells just kept on chiming.  At the end of 10 minutes, we knew about five people in common.  At 20 minutes, the figure had doubled and after 30 minutes, the names were just rolling out along with the expectation that our lives had crossed before.  

She was older than me, but had lived near me as a child and attended the same schools. Her boyfriend at the time was my friend’s older brother.  She played tennis at Milton, but over the road (with the good players).  Her cousin was in my class. The coincidences were as inevitable as rain on a cloudy day. I revelled in being where I felt I was meant to be.