(Submitted by reader R Till)
About 10 years ago I was visiting New York City overnight with a friend. As we were walking down the street in Brooklyn a car pulled over and the driver asked for directions to such-and-such.
We said we didn’t know, we were just visiting from North Carolina. The driver said they were visiting from Cary, NC (a suburb outside Raleigh). I laughed and said that I lived in Cary, and he said he lived in the Preston subdivision. I told him that I lived in Preston’s “rival” subdivision at the time (suburbs are so weird like that haha).
I hope he found the place he was looking for…
[EDITOR: This is the sort of story you tend to hear a lot of, or variations of it. Certainly you get people who grew up together running into each other, but you also get stories of people from the same neighborhood, school, street, etc. who never met (sometimes separated by time, sometimes by pure chance) finding each other somewhere else. This one seems ripe for statistical analysis, as it’s clearly common enough, and when you consider populations, tourist destinations, transplant rates, etc., it’s definitely guaranteed to happen pretty darn regularly, which is exactly what we see here. But it’s still pretty jarring when you see it.
Years back I filmed a movie in Salt Lake City with Nick Cassavetes before he had stepped into (and nicely filled) his father’s directing shoes and was still acting. We spent a lot of time off-set together and when hometowns were discussed it turned out he had lived in mine when he was younger. We narrowed down the exact building in which he lived, which was directly next to the DMV. It was particularly infamous to me because during one of my lengthy visits to that lovely bastion of hope and cheeriness a crowd had formed by the window to watch as a man stood nude in his full-height living room window, displaying himself gleefully to everyone there. Thankfully Nick confirmed this was NOT when he lived there and he was definitely not the man in the window. But it’s a perfect example of those funny little hometown connections in a very unexpected place that lead to a great story.]
I agree with the more you talk to someone you don’t really know the more likely you will have been to that same town.
Back when the Internet was new (AOL new) I met someone in a email discussion group I was in who mentioned he used to live in Salinas when he was a boy. After describing the street and then the house I realized that I had been inside that same house a few years before when house shopping. We thought about purchasing the house but decided against it because of the traffic.
Bet this happens a lot.