It's A Small World After All.....

Last summer, I was part of an ambulance strike team that was sent to the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast region when Hurricanes Gustav and Ike came to town. Our team was made up of some really cool EMTs and paramedics from Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. Our strike team leader was a guy named Brian, who is a Field Supervisor in Contra Costa. I had never met him before; actually I had never met most of the people on the team until we gathered in the ticketing area of SFO the night we were deployed to the Gulf.

Fast forward a week or so to a truck stop somewhere outside Katy, Texas. Our team was sitting down to a nice hot meal in the restaurant located within the truck stop. We had been running back and forth all over southern Texas for a few days, and it was going to be great to sit down and relax for a bit with some real, hot, almost-home cooked food. As we all settled in around the table, our waitress accidentally spilled most of our beverages all over poor Brian. He was good about it, joking with the waitress as she cleaned up the mess. After Brian was dried off, we got to talking about his recent employment at AMR. He came from the ambulance service in Fresno, and I mentioned my in-laws lived there. We chit-chatted about the Fresno area, and I asked him where he had moved to when he came to Contra Costa. He said he had settled in Concord, and I mentioned I had lived in Concord when I graduated high school back in 1989. He asked me which school, and I mentioned it was Concord High. He said that he lived very near Concord High. I said we had lived close to the school too, and I asked which street he lived on. When he told me the street, I laughed and said it was the street *I* lived on. I asked him the numbers of his house, and my jaw almost hit the floor. It was *my* old house! My parents had lived there until a few years ago, when they sold the house and moved up to the mountains. I didn't tell him that right away, but I said things about the details of the house only a resident could know; the HUGE King Arthur style fireplace in the family room addition, the tiny upstairs bedroom, and the big old bar in the family room. He looked at me like I was some alien from another planet, so I let him in on the secret and told him I lived there before he did. He still looked at me like I was insane, but we got to talking about the house, and all of the improvements he had recently done to it. I had seen photos of the house on-line when it was on the market a while back, and the house looked great! We had a great laugh about the coincidence of it all, being more than 2,000 miles away from home and all, and never having met before. Weird....and kind of cool.