It's a Small World After All

It’s a Small World After All

  The location of Fiji.

I suppose that “small world” phenomena aren’t altogether that odd, but I think that a couple of mine are doozies.  Cousin Sam has a better story, about bumping into a Coos Bay, OR, girl in a rainstorm in Turkey, but we will have to bug him for the details.

     My doozie number one:  I was supposed to catch an airplane from my home in Seattle to Haiti. That was a trip I had scheduled after reading a 1947 novel, “Lydia Bailey.”  I just had to see where Henri Christophe faced off against Napoleon, where Toussaint L’Overture faced off against the French forces, to establish the first and only African nation in the Caribbean. My boyfriend at the time was supposed to drive me to the airport, but called to say that he couldn’t get the car to start, so I caught the bus.

A man of my parents’ age sat next to me on the bus.  He explained that he was a “powder monkey,” a guy who set off explosives, returning from a trip home to his work site in Alaska.  “Home” was Florence, OR—my home town. He was Carmine Gallo, whose son Tony was on my high school rifle team, and of course my dad, Vake Sampson, was his plumber.

     Doozie number two:  The “Americans With Disabilities” law had just gone into effect, and I was somewhat of a local expert about what that meant.  A landscape architect called me with a few questions about the act, and explained that he was setting up a display at the next conference of city officials to try to sell his talents. “Let’s get on the agenda,” I told him, and got us an invitation to be speakers. We met at a restaurant to prepare.  He explained that he had just moved south from Alaska, and was trying to get himself established.  I told him that I had a sister who was an architect in Alaska.  He peered hard at me, then said “Sandy!” He had done some work with Sandy’s firm.

     Doozie number three:  Jerry and I had flown for two and a half hours out of Seattle, then for 11 hours out of Los Angeles to a scuba diving site in Fiji.  From the airport at Nadi, we caught a crowded van for a four-hour drive to the north end of the island of Vitu Levi to the Wananuva Beach Resort. We arrived and checked just after midday, when the morning dive boat was just returning to shore. We walked down to the boat to check it out, and to let them know that we would be diving with them the next day.  A little woman walked off the boat, looked up,  and said, “Oh, hi Jerry!”  Her name was Terry, and she was the proprietor of the dive shop that he had patronized when he lived in Lancaster, CA. 
     Oh, and I just remembered a couple more.  When Mark was living in Bakerfield, CA, and I went to visit, I met the wife of one of their doctor friends. Chatting about where we lived in WA (I lived in Snoqualmie at the time, and was doing City Attorney work), she mentioned that her sister was married to a man who had worked at North Bend, WA; Arlington WA (as I recall); and Hoquiam, WA. "Your sister must be married to Jim Neher," I said.  I knew Jim as a City Administrator in those towns. "She is!," she replied, and Dr. Sue thought we were talking about some kind of Johnny Appleseed generic figure.
     And then there was the scuba trip to Cayman Brac Island. On the dive boat, we struck up a friendship with a young couple from the midwest. She was a museum curator and he was an engineer of some kind. When they learned we were from the Seattle area, she said, "I know there are lots of lawyers there, but do you know Mike Reiss?"  Her college roommate at an ivy league school had been Mike Reiss's daughter.  Of course I knew Mike Reiss! We had opposed each other on a case, he had mediated a case for my client, and my son Eric worked for him.