Coincidences
by Rebecca on 2008-02-21
Iʼve been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now, ever since I
found out that my good friend Janae whom I worked with in Washington DC in
the summer of 2003 was in my Political Science 110 class at BYU in the fall of
2000. We were in the same class and never met! And then we worked together in DC
three years later and became practically BFF. So, Iʼve been thinking a
lot about random people who have come into my life and people who know someone
that I know and just all of the funny ways that people are connected. Here are a
few other instances of how life is funny like that.
- We had the missionaries over last week, and one of them has an unusual
Finnish last name. I couldnʼt figure out why his last name sounded
familiar, so he and I played the “Do I know you from somewhere?”
game, and we figured out that his older sister had been in one of my BYU
wards.
- When I left BYU and Provo in 2004, I figured that I was saying goodbye to a
bunch of good friends that I would probably never see again and almost
certainly never live in close proximity to. One of those friends that I left
behind was my good friend and roommate Liz with whom I would stay up late on
Friday night and talk about life and why we were probably never going to get
married and all of the things that we could give up for Lent if we had been
Catholic. And last summer, much to my surprise and delight, she and her
husband got transferred to Austin, of all places, for his job, and they live
20 minutes away from us. Iʼm so happy that they are here!
- When William and I were in San Francisco, we took a bus down Haight Street
to Golden Gate Park, and I remembered that I had been an undergraduate
classics student with a girl whose last name was Haight. I hadnʼt
thought about her in at least 4 years but remembered that she had been
really, really smart. The next Sunday we attended our new ward, and it turns
out that Iantha Haight and her new husband had just moved into our ward as
well. (I do this a lot, where Iʼll remember someone that I
havenʼt seen in a while, and then I will hear from them or see them
like 3 days later.) And the best part of this story is that Ianthaʼs
parents just moved into my parentsʼ ward in New Braunfels!
- My last roommate Elizabeth and I met my first Sunday in Austin in the summer
of 2004. We both thought that the other looked vaguely familiar but
couldnʼt figure it out other than that we had met somewhere at BYU.
And then 2 years later, we moved into a house together and had so much fun
as roommates for the next year and a half. But we still havenʼt
figured out how we know each other. Itʼs almost comical, really.
- (This one is mostly for Sarah.) In the summer of 2004, I took an accelerated
Spanish class at BYU, and it was a class that met from 8-12 every morning.
In such an intense environment, you learn to love or hate the people
youʼre surrounded by. Luckily, I bonded with a few people from that
class, including a fellow Texan, Ammon Franklin. He used to complain that he
wasnʼt really from Waco, Texas but that his parents had moved there
without his permission and forced a new hometown upon him. Anyway, our
teacher was talking to us after class one day, and Ammon was talking about
how he had a hard time asking girls out because he didnʼt have a car.
So, I (in a moment of foolish generosity) said that I would let him borrow
my car the next weekend for whatever date he went on. And he took me up on
the offer and we were friends after that. (Also, Ammon had done a study
abroad in Egypt with my friend Robert.) Several years later, William and I
were talking one day, and I asked him whether he knew Ammon Franklin. He
said that Ammon had been in his ward in Waco, so I told him my car story. He
later asked Ammon if he remembered me from his Spanish class at BYU, and
Ammon said that he had no idea who I was. I find this slightly
disappointing.
Does anyone else have stories like this?