FREELANCE WRITING & PHOTOGRAPHY

Friday, May 23, 2014

It's a Small, Small World

Yesterday, three people boarded the A train and sat in the seats adjoining mine. Half listening to the conversations around me while I was reading, the word Alaska caught my attention and I tuned in. The woman of the trio was sharing a story about taking someone to the hospital in Alaska. This was followed by one of the young men commenting on Alaska's Elmendorf Air Force base. 

Of course, being me, I interrupted their conversation and asked if they were from Alaska, to which one of the young men replied that they were, kind of, having lived there for a while years ago. When I told them that I am from Homer, they looked shocked, looked at one another and then announced that they had all lived in Homer at one point years ago. The two young men are brothers who live in New York City, one a nurse and one an actor and the woman was their mom who was visiting them from Chicago.

As we chatted and shared stories about life in Alaska and New York City, an older man in a seat across the aisle leaned in and told us that he fished the Homer Harbor for King crab in the 1970's.

From meeting New Yorker Rebecca on the streets of Manhattan and finding out that she had once worked at Alyeska, the ski village near Anchorage years ago to bumping in to a young man from Homer at the Brooklyn Flea last summer to volunteering after Hurricane Sandy and boarding a little orange schoolbus and sitting next to Jared who had planned to move to Homer a few summers prior to rent my neighbors cabin to meeting Chris, a fellow pilgrim from Edmonton, Alberta who was also walking the 500 mile Camino de Santiago in Spain and discovering that his coworker was one of my mom's childhood sweethearts, to signing up on an international PenPal site and corresponding with Ari from Switzerland who it turns out visited Homer last summer...

The more I travel, the more I'm reminded that it really is a small world after all~


1 comment:

Lorrene said...

Cool connections ;)