Crossing Paths

Those of us in the military (and other 'globe-trotting' career fields) know better than most how truly small the world can seem at times. In my years of military service, I have lived in three U.S. states and three foreign countries (I was lucky enough to 'hit' Germany twice!), and so one might think that would make my view of the world much broader. Oddly enough, it has only made the world seem smaller. In my first tour in Germany, I lived about twenty miles away from a town called Baumholder, where there was a larger Army base with all the standard facilities. I was at the base clinic in Baumholder one morning during the winter of 90-91 and heard someone call my name. I looked up to see a young man I grew up with and whose prom I had just attended that past spring! I had not even known he was active duty military, much less stationed within a half-hour's drive of me. Many years later (seemingly a lifetime later!), I moved from the Netherlands BACK to Germany, and after about a year my husband and I hosted his god-daughter for a nice visit in which we took her to Bavaria (our standard vacation spot). Walking down the stairs in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich (about a five-hour drive from our home, and around a nine-hour drive from our previous home in the Netherlands), we 'bumped into' one of my husband's former Soldiers from the unit in the Netherlands with his family. Even the smallest of coincidences seem to shrink my world. Here in the greater D.C. area, so many people travel on the metro that it is often literally 'standing room only' on the evening commute, and yet I have on four separate occasions either shared a train or waited on the platform with someone that I knew, quite by coincidence. Modern technology does it's part in this incredible phenomena as well. I recently got a facebook account, and three days later a friend I hadn't heard from in nearly ten years just 'happened' to pop my name into the search and then send me an email. All this, and yet I have lived in this apartment for seven months, and have seen my next-door neighbor exactly once. What interesting times....