Crossing Paths

Have you ever gone on vacation to another state or country and run into someone you know? How amazing is it in this big world to live in California, go another country, decide to skip the requisite package tour and instead visit an out of the way dive and run into someone you went to school or college with or worked with years ago? Odd, but it has happened.
One Friday afternoon I exited my commuter train, sat down in the shade on a bus stop in the charming and quaint suburban town of Claremont, California to wait for my ride. In California language, it was a perfect day. The breeze was warm, and the sun threw hints of summer lingering on my face, even though it was the first day of October. By my estimation, it was eighty degrees. The weather and the surroundings were so lovely that I selfishly wished on my husband’s delay so that I could have more time to enjoy it.
A band was setting up for a free jazz concert at the depot, and every one that passed me slowed down enough to exchange pleasantries.
At the train depot in Claremont, the park like area surroundings encompassed the equivalent of approximately an acre to which there were four black wrought iron benches placed roughly twenty to fifty feet apart.

I sat down on one bench to face the band and watch them for a while as they performed mike checks and tuned instruments. When I decided to read, I moved over to another vacant bench located closer to the street and facing a small parking lot. About fifteen minutes into my reading, a pleasant looking woman, mid fifties, with a cast on her left arm came walking by and sat down on my bench on the other end.
We nodded and spoke, and she told me she had caught an earlier than usual train home and was waiting for her husband. I revealed that I too had caught an earlier train home, and had about an hour wait but I didn’t mind because the weather was so nice.
We continued talking, sharing our lengthy commuter trek stories but both agreeing that it was worth it for the work we performed. She asked me where I worked, and I told her. She told me she used to work for a company with a similar name. When I told her my company had merged with her company, she told me she ran that company for several years and began to name some of my coworkers.
When her ride drove up, she walked to the car, then came back to talk to me again, asking about several other former coworkers and people I might know. We exchanged names and waved goodbye.
When I think of that day, I wonder about the amazement of coincidences and the events that lead up to those events that lead up to those events. She'd caught an earlier than usual train home from Van Nuys, a city approximately 100 miles away from where we were sitting. I had caught an earlier train home and instead of exiting at my normal station about another two miles away, I'd stopped here to wait for my ride, deciding to disembark in Claremont because of the park like atmosphere.
One woman she asked about in particular was a resident I very rarely saw, usually just once a month. Remarkably, I had run into her the day before, and we talked for just minutes, but enough for her memory and our conversation to be indelibly stamped in my mind.
I also thought it to be interesting that usually when people see someone reading a book, they speak and keep on moving, not insist on a conversation. And it wasn’t that she insisted, it was that I believe she saw me and felt a connection to the point where she felt drawn to make conversation. The mystery is that I will probably never know what the connection was. Here you have a fifty to sixty year old white woman in a predominately white town sitting on a bus bench waiting on for her husband, and a forty something black woman with wild hair whipped up by the wind waiting for her man.
For the fifteen minutes we talked, we became transitory friends, laughing, appreciating the weather, life and complimenting the people we'd discovered that we jointly knew. We also discovered that we'd both been invited to the same retirement party earlier that year for a mutual coworker and we both had declined for various reasons. I wonder if we had attended that retirement party, would we have been introduced? Met? Crossed paths and enjoyed a polite conversation as we did on that Friday afternoon at the train depot? Probably not, because of the circumstances that threw us together.
As of the last census, there were 33 million people living and working in California. In the county of Los Angeles, there are nearly 11 million people. In the city of Van Nuys there are approximately 46,000, and in the city of Claremont there are about 36,000.

For in life, I believe there are no coincidences; just the happenstance that, regardless of the population or the location, a series, or chain of events will always cause people to cross paths in some way, shape fashion or form wherever they go.