Saturday, April 7, 2018

Quirks




As the years stack up, I should be getting used to these moments but they still surprise me.



We were strolling by the park here in Venice a few weeks ago, and a vacationing couple on a bench reached out to Mamie as we were going by.

 

 This was nothing unusual. Mamie is ridiculously cute and we generally leave a swath of lopsided smiles in our wake. 




Turned out the couple was not only from our state back home, but the husband, a retired teacher, not only once worked with my son’s mother-in-law, but he had also recently repaved the in-laws’ driveway.



A few days before that, the article I was writing on local artist Mary Erickson took me to her studio for the interview. As I entered, a gentleman in the kitchen introduced himself. We did the usual Florida thing of “where are you from?” (Few people in Florida seem to actually be from Florida, particularly in the winter.)



He was an artist himself and had lived for years in Rockport, MA.

My long-time girlfriend from high school, a stained glass artist, had lived there for 20 years before moving to West Virginia. He said they not only knew each other, but had shared space and friends in an old mill full of studios.



Maybe it just that all roads don’t lead to Rome, they lead to Florida. 

9 comments:

  1. Ha! It IS funny how so many people wind up in Florida, and in the same places. My in-laws winter in a mobile home park in Cortez, and they're just a few miles from several of their friends from their hometown up in Michigan!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It certainly shows how few degrees removed we are. And I learned this back in the fifties, vacationing all over the country. Many conversations my folks struck up turned out to be folks they knew relatives of socially, or worked with friends/family of.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It is indeed a very small world. Which I too forget. Often.

    ReplyDelete
  4. one year when the kids were somewhere between 9 and 11 we flew to Colorado with our camping gear and rented a car to camp around the state. Our first destination was Colorado Springs and we stopped at Garden of the Gods. behind a formation I heard a voice I was certain I knew and it turned out to be our artist friends that lived in Blanco TX, a few hours drive from Houston.

    ReplyDelete
  5. As the song says, "It's a small world after all"
    I'd like to see Florida myself one day, but I bet I won't meet any old friends there.

    ReplyDelete
  6. There are those that travel and those that remain in one place. I think the group that moves about is smaller and more likely to run into each other.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Never thought of it that way! I like your theory.

      Delete
  7. How serendipitous was that? It happens to me, but not very often. It is a small world, though. :-)

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by and I'd love to hear what you think.