Close Encounters

At some point, years into our relationship, Adam and I were talking about Ralph Macchio (of "Karate Kid" fame) and realized that we had both seem him, presumably on the same night, in the made-for-tv movie "The Three Wishes of Billy Grier," where he played a teen suffering from progeria. That was a 1984 movie, so I was only seven years old then and Adam was fourteen, so of course we would not meet for another fourteen years. The movie is a bit obscure (not like if we'd both seen "Roots" or "The Day After"), so we were surprised and a little chilled to know that many years before we would ever meet and change each other's lives, we were each in front of our tv's watching the same little tv movie.

I think about these types of things often. I mean, the fact that there are still people out there in the world who I have yet to meet, but who will have some major impact (hopefully good) on my life. I look at my friends now and realize that I lived many years of my life before I even knew they existed, and yet I am now surrounded by all of these amazing people who were out there...time and fate and the cosmos were just waiting for our respective trajectories to collide into a friendship. Even stranger is the fact that there are people who aren't yet born who are going to enter my life in some distant time in the future; it is so very strange to contemplate that relationship when the person doesn't even yet exist.

Haven't you ever wondered if while walking through a crowd, you passed by or perhaps brushed elbows with your future spouse? Or future best friend? Or the person who will one day propel your career or spirituality to new heights? Sometimes I feel distinctly aware of all of our interconnectedness, how we are all feeding off one another and influencing and enhancing each others' lives without even necessarily meeting. And then there are those people who actually do meet, perhaps after buying the same loaf of marble rye from the same bakery on Tuesday mornings for the last thirty years and yet they've only just met. Isn't that just...just strange and lovely and romantic and sad all at the same time?

I was born just a few days before Elvis died. My husband is old enough (snicker) to remember Elvis' death, and I often find it so interesting that he actually has a memory of the week I was born. Of course, he could never have known that his future wife and the mother of his child had been born just a few days earlier, but the fact that he has a memory of this time, when I was just hours or days old, is intriguing to me. It feels a little bit like magic.