Disney might have the copyright on “It’s A Small World” lyrics but sometimes this phrase really comes to life for us at certain times in our life.  I’ve had several of these moments at particular times but two have stuck out enough where I just shake my head at the sheer coincidence at chance interaction.  This second occurrence happened this past Saturday.

The first time I had a “Wow, what a small world” moment was back at Bradley University during my freshman year.  I was working the desk at the library and one day I wound up talking to a lady checking some books out (she was in her 50s or 60s) and we found out we both grew up in Detroit.  She asked me where exactly I lived and I told her I lived in the northeast corner of the city in a section by Grosse Pointe Park that bordered a canal system (the canal was in our backyard).  She pressed on and I told her we lived on a street called Scripps that was across the canal from Harbor Island (a man-made island carved out by the canals in a rectangle shape, accessible on one side by a small bridge).  I wish I could remember her name but she then said “James, I grew up on Harbor Island!”

Keep in mind I’m at a university in Peoria, Illinois, 7 hours from Detroit.  Yes there were some people from Detroit at the school but we were few and far between.  Anyway, every time she’d visit the library we would reminisce about the neighborhood and she eventually brought a bunch of black and white photos from the 1940s and 50s of the area.  The only depressing part of that was how nice Detroit actually looked back then it its heyday when it was the fifth largest city in the country and we were one of the manufacturing hubs of the world.

Fast forward to this past Saturday at my company’s holiday party held at a coworker’s (very nice) house.  There was a band for the evening and we also had a food caterer.  The lady who owned the catering company was there working with her staff.  She was very sociable and we all gave her kudos for the food she had provided, as it was quite tasty.  As conversations tend to do, it veered from one topic to the next and before long I found out she was initially from Wisconsin.  I told her I was born in Milwaukee and lived in a suburb there for the first three years of my life with my mom and grandparents.  After I found out she too grew up in Wauwatosa, I figured “Why not?” and told her the street we lived on was Vienna.

It turns out she grew up in a house two blocks away.  She knew the neighbors names I tossed out since I had fond memories of the place.  We visited there 3 or 4 times a year growing up so I knew the area relatively well even though we had moved to Detroit at the age of 3.

I’m keeping her name anonymous, as I wanted to include part of a reply I got from her via email yesterday as I was providing more specifics to her about my mom and her family and the area in general.  She then wrote back about more neighbors but the following few sentences had me doubled over in laughter.  I’ve deleted the last name of the family she talks about.

You lived a block down, so didn't know too many on your block....on the corner at the triangle were the XXXXXX's (the "colored" people), and Andre' was my youngest brother's best friend.  One day I heard them jumping around upstairs in my brother's bedroom and they were dancing around naked - with a black strobe light on and all you could see of Andre' was his teeth and the whites of his eyes.  My brother would kill me if he knew I repeated that.

I simply don’t even have to comment on that memory.  The jokes simply write themselves.

But back to the subject of this post, we truly do live in a world that sometimes is smaller than we think.  The moral of the story is don’t get caught jumping naked in your bedroom, otherwise you run the risk of your sister telling the story to someone 1,000 miles away 40 years later!  Unlike Vegas, what happens in Wauwatosa doesn’t always stay in Wauwatosa!