Coincidences

About a year ago, I was wasting time on Facebook, going through a friend's pictures. Mario and I went to high school together, and although I'm not positive, I think he's originally from Chicago. I learned that he was now living in San Francisco, and I was flipping through his photographs randomly when I came across one that made me stop in my tracks and rub my eyes (they way people always say they do, but you assume it's just an expression). Mario and my friend Xuan were standing together in the same room!

Lest this news shocks you slightly less than it did me, allow me to elaborate: Xuan and I went to college together. In Nashville, TN. Mario is from Chicago and went to college in California. I couldn't figure out the connection, so I emailed Mario and discovered that he and Xuan were actually ROOMMATES who found each other through a Craigslist posting. Totally weird, and I spent the next few days shaking my head and reflecting on how, while many people touch our lives, they're out there touching other people's lives at the same time, and how many connections we all have.

This is not news to Kevin Bacon.

Here in New York a few weeks ago, I went to a birthday party for a friend named Frank. Frank is from New York originally, and he and I met in Tokyo where we both taught English. I was pleased to share a city with him for a second time; he is, as they say, "good people". One of his friends, Josh, started talking to me, and the topic of teaching came up, as it always seems to when I'm involved in a conversation for more than 90 seconds. I mentioned teaching in Tennessee, and when Josh asked what city, he seemed mildly surprised to hear I'd lived in Nashville. "I went to Vanderbilt," he explained. "So did I," I countered. We graduated a year apart, which is not all that weird, but we were both members of the same outdoors club. We never met because I joined a semester after he graduated, giving us an huge group of mutual friends. We name-dropped happily for the rest of the night, and this again lead me to several days of head shaking and reflection.

Then of course, there was the Doug encounter, which I'm sure you read about as you avidly devoured my entry about the Boston trip.

But today, I've got one that possibly tops both of those. I just finished reading _A Long Way Gone_, a great memoir by a former boy solider in Sierra Leone by Ishmael Beah.

It's one of those books that hits you pretty hard, as you might imagine, and so to give myself time to mull it all over once I'd read the last page of the actual novel itself, I found myself skimming over the Acknowledgements page. My skimming ceased when my eyes hit the name Rose Lichter-Marck. When I was about ten, I went to a summer camp in northern California with a girl named Rosie Lichter-Marck. We weren't necessarily inseparable - in fact, I'm not sure if we even really liked each other much - but I'd always remembered her name because, well, how do you forget a name like that? Back to trusty Facebook, where I found her (not surprisingly, I got only one result in my search) and wrote her a message to inquire whether this was really her. So that's Coincidence #1.

Enter Coincidence #2: Rose is part of the Columbia network. For those of you who are not Facebook aficionados: I can only look at detailed information for people who are listed as friends or who are in the same network I am. Rose was not listed as my friend, as I'd not really thought about her existence for nearly two decades. She was however, I was astonished to discover, in the Columbia network. Seconds later, I was skimming through her profile, only to find that she is a first year grad. student here (!) and she worked for the publishing company that released _A Long Way Gone_ for two years, during the time that Beah would have been in contact with them (!!)

With each occurrence like this, I think to myself that this is it, nothing else will surprise me. I can only conclude that, like in numerous other instances, I'm wrong, and that I'll be blown away by something even more coincidental next week. And maybe I really AM connected to the whole human race.