All of which means that I was not all that surprised when I recently found a piece of mail in my box addressed to my family with the name misspelled by two letters. While I am not usually confused for someone else, my name is frequently misspelled, so I didn't think much of it. But I did look at the envelope more closely. It was clearly a Christmas card. Who was sending me a Christmas card but couldn't manage to spell my name correctly? The return address was a name I didn't recognize, but it was in the town in which I was born in New Jersey, so perhaps it was a family member who had married into a name that didn't immediately ring a bell. Despite the fact that I'm horrible about sending out Christmas cards, amazingly enough, I continue to receive some, even from family that I don't often see. But wouldn't you think a family member would know how to spell my name? I squinted at the envelope. Look at that.The apartment number was one digit off as well. These folks must really have been in a hurry to get out their Christmas cards.
I threw the envelope in my bag and headed into my apartment. My bag being something of a black hole, I didn't see or think about it again for several days. When the weekend arrived, and I began pulling apart all of the items I'd thrown in there during the week, I once again peered at the envelope. Finally curious enough to actually open it, I found one of those photo-cards with holiday greetings from a family that appeared to be made up of a couple and their young daughter. Cute. But I still didn't know who these people were. Now, the older I get, the worse my memory is getting, and I'm lucky I can remember where to go home each day. The name was almost mine. The apartment number was only one digit off. And it was in my mailbox. Was it possible that this card wasn't meant for me?
Because anything worth knowing can be found on Google, I decided to Google the name as written on the envelope, along with "Gainesville, Florida," and see if I could find any evidence that someone by that exact name did exist. And, indeed, they did. It seemed that there was a couple with that last name here in Gainesville, although every reference to an address that turned up was on the other side of town. Still, it was awfully coincidental. Even more interesting, the man was a customer service manager with Publix, which made me laugh, since we'd been having great discussion about having someone representing Publix's excellent customer service philosophy speak at our upcoming Staff Development Day. Maybe this was a sign.
I marveled at the way all of this came together and considered the evidence. Let me get this straight. Someone with a name just a few letters off of my extremely usual moniker lived in the apartment across the breezeway from mine. In the city in Florida to which I moved only nine months ago. And knows people in the small New Jersey town in which I was born. Does exactly the job that my co-workers were saying needs to be covered at a work function. It couldn't be more obvious that I needed to meet these people. Now, I quite value my alone time and am careful about when I choose to increase the circle of people around me. Plus, I don't usually know my neighbors. Not that I don't want to, really, but then they want to start borrowing a cup of sugar and eggs, and, well...I don't cook.
But I was beginning to feel the need to make an exception. I just don't come across people with a similar name to mine very often, and certainly not one with connections to to my hometown (even if I did only live there for the first six months of my life). I wanted to know these people. In fact, I was sort of excited about meeting my neighbors. Maybe they even knew people that my family knew. Their friends on the Christmas card looked nice enough, anyway.
And then I remembered. Just a couple of weeks ago, I'd noticed that the apartment complex management was updating that apartment. The door stood wide open for two days while they hauled in the new kitchen cabinets and sink from the front lawn (thank goodness, as I was really cranky about the kitchen sink laying out on the grass like this was a junk yard). Evidently, the last residents had moved out, and they were updating before new people moved in. I wouldn't know, what with never really meeting the previous residents and all. But it seemed a reasonable assessment. At the time, I only noticed this in relation to the fact that I was still living in an apartment needing upgrading while the one across the breezeway was getting a face life. I could leave for two days, if that's all it took. But now, I felt disappointed, realizing that my chance to know the people who could be distant cousins had passed. There would be no exclamations of delight over how close our name were. No "do you know...'s?" over people in New Jersey that we might have in common (okay, since I lived there as a baby and haven't been back in more years than I like to count, this was unlikely, but one can hope). No offers to come speak at my library's training day. For free. Despondent, I set the envelope back down. So much for a reunion.
I am amazed at how many connections we have to one another that we don't even know about. My dad's cousin married a boy who used to play with my mom when they were kids. A friend has been babysitting for the daughter of one of my favorite authors. The person running the volunteer program with which I occasionally help out used to run a
similar program back in Raleigh and knew a good friend of mine. Ferris Bueller's sister Jeannie ran into people all over town who, it turned out, knew her brother and were greatly impacted by his supposed illness. You never know when an unexpected network gets a little bigger. Or, could get a little bigger if people just wouldn't move before you go introduce yourself. As Ferris said, life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
